The authors present a multicomponent dynamic developmental theory of human autobiographical memory that emerges gradually across the preschool years. The components that contribute to the process of emergence include basic memory abilities, language and narrative, adult memory talk, temporal understanding, and understanding of self and others. The authors review the empirical developmental evidence within each of these components to show how each contributes to the timing, quantity, and quality of personal memories from the early years of life. The authors then consider the relevance of the theory to explanations of childhood amnesia and how the theory accounts for and predicts the complex findings on adults' earliest memories, including individual, gender, and cultural differences.

Recent research on young children's memory for personal episodes provides new insights into the phenomenon of infantile amnesia, first identified by Freud. New research indicates that children learn to share memories with others, that they acquire the narrative forms of memory recounting, and that such recounts are effective in reinstating experienced memories only after the children can utilize another person's representation of an experience in language as a reinstatement of their own experience. This competence requires a level of mastery of the representational function of language that appears at the earliest in the mid to late preschool years.

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A conceptual model is proposed to account for the child's initial translation of meanings into words. The model is discussed in terms of the characteristics of word acquisition and of the relation between first words and first sentences. While concept formation theory, semantic feature theory, and Piagetian theory are each alone inadequate to account for this process, each makes a necessary contribution to an adequate solution. The resulting model rests upon the assumption that the young child translates the dynamic functional relations of objects into conceptual "core" meanings to which identificational features of concept instances are attached. It differentiates between the meaning of a concept and its referents and relates these to concept generation and concept identification, respectively. Some wider implications of the model for acquiring concepts and general semantic categories and for constructing sentences are briefly considered.