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L. Markson and P. Bloom (1997) concluded that there was evidence against a dedicated system for word learning on the basis of their finding that children remembered a novel word and a novel fact equally well. However, a word-learning system involves more than recognition memory; it must also provide a means to guide the extension of words to additional exemplars, and words and facts may differ with regard to extendibility. Two studies are reported in which 2-4-year-old children learned novel words and novel facts for unfamiliar objects and then were asked to extend the words and facts to additional exemplars of the training objects. In both studies, children extended the novel word to significantly more category members than they extended the novel fact. The results show that by 2 years of age, children honor the necessary extendibility of novel count nouns but are uncertain about the extendibility of arbitrary facts.

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Research on the development of autobiographical memory in children has revealed the importance of two seemingly separate but related factors: Theory of mind, or the ability to know what another can and cannot know, and narrative skill, or the ability to tell a coherently structured story. The present research study with 22 preschoolers examined the extent to which each factor predicts two separate components of autobiographical memory ability: (1) the content of memory and (2) the structure of the memory narrative. As hypothesized, we found that theory of mind skills predicted the 'how' or structure of the children's fictional story narratives, whereas narrative skills predicted the 'how much' or content of the children's memory. Implications for the development of autobiographical memory are discussed.The personal stories Sacks refers to appear in many guises in the empirical literature on memory and are commonly referred to as autobiographical, or recollective, memory (e.g. Brewer, 1986Brewer, , 1995. Autobiographical memories often take the linguistic structure of narratives, or life-stories, that are shared with others through discourse (e.g. Engel, 1999;Linde, 1993). By definition, autobiographical memories are experienced as the vivid reliving of moments from times-past and are recounted as narratives that often contain reference to the place, the actions, the people present, the objects involved, as well as the teller's thoughts and emotions surrounding the event (Brewer, 1995;Engel, 1999;Rubin,

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