Text competence in production and perception: MAIN

The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was developed in the framework of COST Action IS0804 “Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment” in order to assess narrative production and comprehension abilities of bilingual children from 3 to 9 years old. 

Our goal was to compile an instrument that could be used to elicit narrative texts from children from diverse linguistic, socio-economic and cultural backgrounds to enable clinicians and researchers to distinguish between bilingual children with and without SLI. The particular aim has been to develop four comparable and thoroughly controlled picture sequences: two for story generation and two for retelling (or model stories). The general aim of the clearly scripted sequences was to provide more control over the semi-spontaneous data, to make comparisons across languages/narratives possible and to increase the validity and reliability of the measures.  The general fundamental objective has been to ensure comparability across the four sets of the elicitation stimuli for macrostructure features, since these were expected to be more universal or language-general than microstructure features, which differ typologically as well as across languages from the same families.  In sum, MAIN should allow to evaluate the text competence in production and perception in both languages of bilingual children.