Personal Narratives of 10-Year-Old Children in Iceland: Verbal Productivity, Word Diversity, and Topics

Abstract

Introduction: The feasibility of using a standard protocol, labelled as the Global TALES, to elicit personal stories was tested across 10 different countries between 2019 and 2021. Personal narratives have not been investigated in Iceland in a similar way. The aim was to explore personal narratives of monolingual children in Iceland by using the Global TALES (2018) protocol to investigate verbal productivity, semantic diversity, and narrative topics. Methods: Twenty-seven children (ages 9; 8–10; 9) with typical language development produced personal stories in response to six emotion-based prompts contained in the protocol. The children were interviewed by using the Zoom platform because of COVID restrictions. Children’s spoken language was analysed for total number of utterances (TNU), total number of words (TNW), number of different words (NDW), mean length of utterances in words (MLUw), and proportion of words with grammatical errors. The narrative topics were coded and documented. Results: The spoken language measures showed that there was a large individual variability within the group on all metrics examined. The mean TNU was 62.1 (SD 20.2) utterances, the mean for TNW was 546 (SD 219) words, the mean for NDW was 206 (SD 62) words, and the MLUw was 8.6 (SD 1.5) words in an utterance. Despite the variability in spoken language performance, around 70–75% of the participants produced TNU, TNW, NDW, and MLUw within +/− 1 SD from the mean. The topics of the stories were most frequently related to personal achievement or relationships with the family or friends. Conclusion: The Global TALES (2018) protocol can be used to elicit personal stories in 10-year-old children in Iceland. The results related to verbal productivity and the topics of interest were in line with previous studies around the world.