How Children Learn to Talk About Characters’ Thoughts and Feelings

What is it about?

When children tell or retell a story, they do more than describe what happens. They also talk about what characters want, think, feel, and perceive. These words and expressions, known as internal state terms, help children make characters’ inner worlds explicit and connect events in a story. In this international study, we analysed 5,507 picture-based narratives produced by 2,763 children aged 3 to 13 years from 32 countries, speaking 44 languages. All narratives were elicited using the LITMUS-Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). We found that children’s use of internal state terms increased substantially with age, particularly during the primary school years. Children also used considerably more of these terms when retelling a story than when creating a story from pictures alone. Importantly, bilingual children showed similar patterns to monolingual children and used internal state terms similarly across their two languages. These findings provide new insights into how children develop the ability to express characters’ thoughts, emotions, and perceptions, and highlight the potential of narrative tasks for language assessment and intervention.

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Why is it important?

Understanding how children talk about characters’ thoughts and feelings can provide valuable information about their developing narrative and language skills. Our findings show that age and the way a story is elicited have an important influence on children’s use of internal state terms, while bilingualism does not necessarily limit this ability. The strong effect of retelling also suggests that this format can provide useful support when assessing children’s narrative skills, including bilingual children. These findings may help researchers and speech-language pathologists make more informed use of narrative assessment in both research and clinical contexts.

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