The authors examined the contributions of maternal structure and autonomy support to children's collaborative and independent reminiscing. Fifty mother-child dyads discussed past experiences when the children were 40 and 65 months old. Children also discussed past events with an experimenter at each age. Maternal structure and autonomy support appeared as 2 distinct and separable components of mothers' reminiscing style and acted in an additive fashion to predict children's memory. Children whose mothers demonstrated both high structure and high autonomy support provided the greatest memory in these conversations, whereas children whose mothers were low on both dimensions provided minimal memory. The authors discuss the implications of these effects for children's autobiographical memory development.

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Young children's verbal recall for personally experienced events was examined over extended time periods across the traditional boundary of childhood amnesia. Forty children, aged 5 1 =2, discussed with an experimenter personal experiences that had taken place when they were as young as 1 1 =2. At 5 1 =2 children had not yet forgotten at least some events from before age 3 1 =2, the average offset of childhood amnesia. There was a qualitative shift in children's recall for events that occurred before age 2; for events that happened before age 2, only around half of children's recall was accurate. For events that occurred after this age, over 75% of children's recall was accurate. Complete forgetting of very early childhood has not yet occurred by age 5 1 =2.

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