What Do Children in India Talk About? Personal Narratives of Typically Developing Hindi-Speaking Children.
Vasundhara Srivastava, Angel Chan, Marleen F Westerveld
PMID 37778339WHAT IT FOUND
Hindi-speaking children in India described personal narratives using topics common to other cultures, such as birthdays and school tasks, but also highlighted helping others and welcoming guests.
These themes reflect collectivist cultural values. The protocol successfully elicited narratives, though children needed extra prompts for 'problem' questions.
Key findings
01The Global TALES Protocol elicited 179 personal narratives from the participants, with only one non-response to a prompt.
02In response to the 'problem' prompt, 23 of the children described helping someone through actions or moral advice, a topic linked to collectivist cultural values.
03Novel topics included 'welcoming guests' and financial tension, which were not observed in the cross-cultural comparison group.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small (30 children) and drawn from a single urban region (Varanasi) with similar socio-economic status, limiting generalizability to all Hindi-speaking children in India. The participants were younger (6-9 years) than the comparison group in the original Westerveld study (10-year-olds), which may influence topic complexity. The study focused on topic coding rather than linguistic analysis (e.g., syntax, lexical diversity), so it does not provide data on narrative structure or quality.
Declared interests
The first author is supported by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme. The authors declared no commercial or financial conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that the absence of topics like 'moving house' or 'receiving gifts' in the Indian sample indicates a narrative deficit. These differences reflect cultural values such as collectivism and hospitality, not a lack of language ability. Additionally, the high frequency of 'helping others' in 'problem' narratives may be partly primed by the specific wording of the follow-up prompt used.