Exploring Microstructure Measures and Topics in Personal Narratives of Turkish School-Age Children: Findings From the Global TALES-TR Protocol

Background: The Global TALES protocol is an internationally used personal narrative assessment tool designed to elicit and analyse children’s personal narratives across languages and cultures. Aim: The aim of this study is to provide the Turkish literature with assessment data derived from typically developing (TD) children aged 7–10 years and to examine the applicability of the Turkish-adapted version within a Turkish linguistic and cultural context. Methods and Procedures: This descriptive, cross-sectional study included eighty monolingual Turkish-speaking TD children, with 20 children in each age group (7 10 years). The Turkish-adapted Global TALES-TR protocol was conducted online with the children. The narratives were assessed for microstructure measures using the Turkish Research Version of the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) program. SPSS22.0 and TURCOSA software were used for statistical analysis. Results: Some age-related differences were observed in children’s narrative microstructure, with significant contrasts between the youngest and oldest groups in verbal productivity and semantic diversity, while a more limited age effect was observed for semantic diversity between the age-8 and age-9 groups. Gender-related differences were limited. When the full sample was considered, a measure reflecting syntactic complexity showed a gender effect. Age-specific analyses indicated that gender related differences in verbal productivity and syntactic complexity were observed only in the age-9 group. All observed gender-related differences favoured girls. The frequency of follow-up prompts and unanswered prompts showed that the ‘problem’ narrative was the most challenging for children. Narratives primarily focused on topics such as family, friends, school and success. Conclusions: The results show that the adapted protocol can be used in personal narrative assessment. These findings may inform future research and clinical assessment practices. Furthermore, using this protocol, broader information can also be gathered about groups such as those with language disorders.