Specialised workshop “Procedures for the Administration of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) and Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA)”

The workshop was devoted to a detailed examination of the procedures for administering the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), the Sentence Repetition Task (SRT) and the Automated Working Memory Assessment (AWMA), with particular emphasis on the consistency of examiner instructions, the sequencing of tasks, the methods for recording responses and the need for rigorously controlled administration in a multilingual context. Within the discussion of MAIN, particular attention was drawn to its importance in assessing the comprehension and production of narrative structures, whereas, in relation to the SRT and AWMA tasks, special emphasis was placed on the standardized administration of repetition and working memory tasks as important indicators of linguistic processing, verbal memory, and cognitive processing in children.

The workshop’s particular value lay in its immediate operational function: it enabled the alignment of the research team in advance of the fieldwork phase, clarified all key methodological issues and further strengthened examiner reliability within an international research environment. Among others, the workshop was attended by Giorgia Mazzetti, a student from University Roma Tre, who had been undertaking an exchange period at the Faculty of Humanities of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula and who will also take part in the forthcoming field research in Rome. Her participation further attests to the international and collaborative dimension of the research activities, as well as to the importance of involving early-career researchers in the implementation of empirical studies in multilingual and interdisciplinary contexts.