The influence of the addressee on picture-based narratives told by young adults: Task formulation effects on macrostructure

This study investigates whether and how the formulation of a picture-based narrative task—specifically, the specification of the addressee—affects macrostructural richness in young adult narratives. Although the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is increasingly used with adults, it typically pairs child-oriented stimuli with adult-directed instructions, and the impact of addressee specification on macrostructure has not been tested experimentally. The present study provides the first controlled investigation of this methodological factor. Sixty speakers of German, Polish, and Russian each produced two MAIN narratives under different task formulations: one addressed to the adult examiner and one to an imagined child. A total of 120 narratives was analyzed in terms of story structure and macrostructural component frequencies. Child-directed instruction yielded consistently higher story structure scores, indicating greater macrostructural richness across all languages. Story type did not influence outcomes. Language effects emerged only under adult-directed instruction and are best explained by differences in task interpretation rather than language-specific narrative competence. These results demonstrate that addressee specification is a critical methodological parameter in young adult narrative elicitation and has important implications for the interpretation and comparability of adult MAIN data.