CHILDRENS RECALL AND RECOGNITION MEMORY FOR TYPICAL AND ATYPICAL ACTIONS IN SCRIPT-BASED STORIES

Preschool and first-grade children′s recall and recognition memory for typical and atypical actions in script-based stories were examined. Atypical actions varied in plausibility, from plausible (e.g., [At the movies] A girl eating pizza was in front of them.) to plausible within the sentence but implausible within the story (e.g., [At the movies] A cat was eating cat food in front of them.) to implausible (e.g., [At the movies] A cat was eating pickles in front of them.). On the recall task children reported more atypical than typical script actions, and the less plausible, atypical actions were better recalled than the more plausible, atypical actions. On the recognition task, however, each type of atypical action was equally well recognized. Children also had difficulty distinguishing between typical script actions present in the stories with script actions not present in the stories but equally typical. These results are discussed in terms of a script-pointer-plus-tag hypothesis of memory. © 1993 by Academic Press, Inc.