Peer-reviewed article
Personal Narrative Assessment to Guide Clinical Practices in the Assessment and Support of Children With Developmental Language Disorder: A Tutorial.
Jensen de López K, Gabaj M, Gupta V, Søndergaard Knudsen HB, Kuvač Kraljević J ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This is a clinical tutorial on using personal narrative assessment to evaluate language skills in children with developmental language disorder. It describes the Global TALES protocol and LUNA framework for analyzing discourse components in a child's spoken narratives. The document demonstrates these assessment methods through a case study of a 7-year-old Danish-speaking child and provides guidance for clinicians on interpreting results.
Key points
- The Global TALES protocol is used to elicit personal narratives from children
- The LUNA framework analyzes narratives across four components: pragmatics, macrostructure planning, propositional content, and linguistic features
- Personal narrative assessment can support diagnostic decision-making and identification of intervention goals
- The tutorial includes a detailed case study demonstrating how to analyze and interpret a child's narrative production
- Clinical language measures are linked to each LUNA framework component to identify child strengths and challenges
Limitations
This tutorial focuses on clinical assessment methodology rather than evaluating whether specific interventions improve child outcomes or well-being. It does not present evidence of effectiveness or impact on children's development beyond describing an assessment approach.
Abstract
Purpose This tutorial demonstrates how personal narratives elicited using the Global TALES (Talking About Lived Experiences in Stories) protocol can be analyzed using the four components of the Linguistic Underpinnings of Narrative in Aphasia (LUNA) framework for discourse analysis-pragmatics, macrostructure planning, propositional, and linguistic-in clinical practice to assess the language and communication skills of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Such analysis can support diagnostic decision making or identification and monitoring of intervention goals related to the child's needs. Language measures that can be applied and interpreted in clinical practice are presented and linked to each of the four components of the LUNA framework. By understanding which measures correspond to these components, clinicians can identify the child's strengths and challenges across the four components to obtain a more complete view of the child's oral narrative production skills. An analysis of a personal narrative from a 7-year-old Danish-speaking child with DLD, elicited using the Global TALES protocol, was used to demonstrate in detail how to analyze personal narratives and interpret the results in a clinical setting using the LUNA framework. The case study also includes recommendations for supporting and monitoring the child's progress. Conclusions This tutorial guides clinicians to integrate personal narratives as part of their assessment and treatment for children with DLD. The measures presented and discussed in the tutorial can help clinicians pinpoint interrelated discourse components and processes that need to be assessed and integrated into future support for a child's language development and overall well-being.