Multilingual Assessment Instrument of Narratives (MAIN)

Product or Programme · All products and programmes
Evidence · 5 claims (3 for, 2 mixed) · 1 study (1 associational), q3 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 5 claims rest on one study

Description

MAIN is a multilingual narrative assessment developed by an international research team to evaluate children's narrative production and comprehension through story-telling, story-retelling, or model-story tasks.

Components

• Multilingual Assessment Instrument of Narratives (MAIN) used as a story retell task for bilingual narrative assessment: MAIN is a tool "developed to assess narrative production and comprehension skills of children from 3- to 10-years-old," usable as a story tell, retell, or model story. In this study the dog and cat parallel stories were used as retells with 56 children, scored for story structure (17-point scale), structural complexity (3-point system), internal state terms, and comprehension questions, alongside SALT-coded microstructure measures. The authors note it supports ecologically valid identification of language disorders in bilingual children. (Hayes et al. (2026))

Claims

• All children retold MAIN episode one with the most complexity and episode two with the least, regardless of age or language group [+W]
• No macrostructure measure differs significantly between bilingual and monolingual children, while age improves story structure, internal state terms, comprehension, and aggregate scores but not structural complexity [+W]
• Bilingual children showed a nonsignificant advantage on the hardest theory-of-mind comprehension question, and MAIN comprehension questions may be too easy for the age range [~W]
• All narrative microstructure measures increase with age group, but only lexical diversity (NDW) differs between Japanese–English bilingual and English monolingual children [+W]
• Language × Age interactions show bilingual preschoolers had the lowest MLUm, NDW, and SI scores, while bilingual school-age children produced the most fragments [~W]

Related Products and Programmes

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Key Sources

• Hayes, R. L., and Kan, P. F. (2026). Shared and divergent patterns in narrative skills: comparing English monolingual and Japanese–English bilingual children. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1747702

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	product
id	multilingual-assessment-instrument-of-narratives-main
title	Multilingual Assessment Instrument of Narratives (MAIN)
description	MAIN is a multilingual narrative assessment developed by an international research team to evaluate children's narrative production and comprehension through story-telling, story-retelling, or model-story tasks.
status	review
moved_from	element/main-story-retell-narrative-assessment
product_kind	assessment
generated	by process:sweep-kinds on 2026-10-10
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources	1 — hayes-2026

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