Journal of experimental child psychology
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Three- and 5-year-old children took part in a quasi-medical event in which the child and an adult stranger examined a "sick" teddy bear. Three days and 1 year after the event, children were interviewed in one of three interview conditions; with real items from the event (real props); with toy representations of those items (toy props); or with verbal prompts (no props). After 3 days, both toys and real items facilitated children's reports compared to verbal prompts, but children interviewed with toy props were less accurate than those interviewed with either real items or verbal prompts. ⋯ The report of the older children were as accurate at the 1-year delay as at the 3-day delay, whereas the reports of the younger children were particularly susceptible to errors. Correct information was more likely to be repeated across interviews than were errors. New information introduced for the first time after 1 year was highly unreliable for both age groups, whereas that repeated across interviews was highly reliable.
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This study examines children's modification of their own retrieval processes in a cued recall task. Each experiment had multiple study-test trails with triplets of categorically related words (Horse-Pig-Cow). Category-orienting questions were asked at acquisition, and each trial had different triplet stimuli. ⋯ The results showed induction of an effective retrieval strategy in the situations of maximum retrieval support even by the 7-year olds, and developmental differences occurred in the situations where the retrieval cues provided few hints about the acquisition encoding operation. The results suggest that monitoring and modification of retrieval processes should be distinguished and that monitoring is necessary but not sufficient for induction of an effective retrieval strategy. The results have implications for understanding children's strategy-utilization deficiencies in memory tasks.
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J Exp Child Psychol · Jun 1995
Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical TrialOne- to two-year-olds' recall of events: the more expressed, the more impressed.
The literature on stylistic differences in mother-child conversations about ongoing and past events can be interpreted to suggest that the opportunity to verbally elaborate on an event facilitates preschoolers' memory. In this research we examined whether similar effects would obtain in children who are just acquiring language and, thus, the opportunity for verbal encoding. Using elicited imitation, 12 groups, formed by a between-subjects crossing of 3 levels of age (13, 16, and 20 months) with 4 levels of delay (1-3, 6, 9, and 12 months), were tested for memory for specific laboratory events; children's event-relevant verbalizations also were recorded. ⋯ Memories were demonstrated both nonverbally and verbally; nonverbal and verbal measures bore a modest relation with one another. Language ability at the time of exposure to the events predicted verbal expression of memory after the delay. Thus, the availability of a verbal mode of elaboration facilitated 1- to 2-year-olds' event memory.
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J Exp Child Psychol · Apr 1989
Time and again: effects of repetition and retention interval on 2 year olds' event recall.
How and what very young children remember is a central question for understanding the course of memory development. In this research, we examined the effects of two factors on 2-year-old children's ability to recall novel events: repetition of the experience and time since experience. Twenty 24-month-old and twenty 28-month-old children participated in unusual laboratory play events. ⋯ All children recalled more information about the activities associated with the event than about the objects. Surprisingly, children in the repeated experience condition recalled as much about the events at the 3-month retention interval as at the 2-week retention interval. Further, children in this condition recalled more information at the 3-month retention interval than children in the single experience condition, suggesting that reexperiencing an event may guard against long-term forgetting.