Child-initiated conversations about the past and memory performance by preschoolers

This study examined the effect of parent-child conversations on memory performance by 3- to 4-year-old children. Ten boys and 10 girls participated in a unique event without their parents present. Parents provided diary records of the frequency and content of child-initiated conversations about the event over a 1-week retention interval. The children were interviewed by an experimenter at the end of the 1-week delay. All children initiated a conversation with their parent(s) about the event at least once, providing highly detailed and accurate information about that event. There was a significant relation between the amount of information children reported to their parents and the amount of information they reported to the experimenter. Children did not, however, report a stable core of information in these two contexts; approximately half of the information children reported to the experimenter had not been discussed with their parents. These findings have important theoretical implications for current views of childhood amnesia and important practical implications for interpreting children's verbal reports in clinical and legal settings.