Assessment of Personal Narrative Skills in Children Aged 4–18 Years: A Systematic Review

PURPOSE: Assessment of children's personal narratives offers important insights into their functional language abilities. This systematic review identifies current assessment and analysis practices for evaluating the personal event narratives of school-age children and provides a comprehensive overview to guide future research and clinical application. METHOD: The review was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42022345679) and followed PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Electronic databases (CINAHL, ERIC, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, SCOPUS, and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global) were searched in August 2022 and September 2024 for peer-reviewed studies and dissertations or theses published in English that evaluated personal narrative skills in participants aged 4-18 years. There was no date limit. Extracted data included study design, participant samples, assessment tasks, and analysis measures. Analysis measures were categorized using the Linguistic Underpinnings of Narrative in Aphasia (LUNA) framework. RESULTS: A total of 211 studies (37,477 participants) were included. Recent years have seen an increasing number of studies related to personal narratives. Elicitation methods commonly involved question prompts, brief examples, and modeled personal narratives. Across studies, 907 analysis measures were identified (763 language measures), reflecting substantial heterogeneity. Discourse aspects analyzed spanned all four LUNA framework components: pragmatics, macrostructure planning, propositional, and linguistic. CONCLUSIONS: This review article catalogs the range of assessment methods and analysis procedures that can be used to evaluate children's personal narratives. Mapping the language measures onto the LUNA framework highlighted which discourse elements have received research attention. These findings may assist clinicians in interpreting available data and selecting assessment and intervention targets. The accompanying open-access data set, available via the Open Science Framework (OSF) repository, provides a foundation for future research, including investigations of population-specific needs and methodological trends.