Introduction: During face-to-face questioning typically developing children and

Adults find it harder to remember the names of familiar people than other biographical information such as occupation or nationality. It has been suggested that the opposite effect occurs in children (Scanlan & Johnston, 1997). We failed to replicate the effects found by Scanlan and Johnston and instead found that children were slower to match a name than an occupation to a famous face (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2 and 3, however, we show a temporal advantage for names in both adults and children when highly familiar faces are used. This is the case for famous and personally known faces. These results show that the speed of name retrieval is influenced by familiarity in the same way in both children and adults and indicate that children do not represent knowledge for familiar people differently from adults. The implications of these results for current models of name retrieval difficulties are discussed.

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A robust finding from the eyewitness literature is that children are as accurate as adults on target-present lineups from the age of five years, whereas they continue to make an erroneous false positive identification from a target-absent lineup up until fourteen years (Pozzulo & Lindsay, 1998). The current study explores whether the same pattern occurs when voices are used instead of faces and evaluates the reliability of children as potential earwitnesses. A total of 334 participants from six age groups (6-7-year-olds, 8-9-yearolds, 10-11-year-olds, 12-13-year-olds, 14-15-year-olds and adults) listened to a 30 second audio clip of an unfamiliar voice and were then presented with either a six person target-present or target-absent voice lineup. Overall, participants were more accurate with target-present than target-absent lineups. Performance on target-present lineups showed adult-like levels of attainment by 8-9 years of age. In contrast, performance on targetabsent lineups was extremely poor and remained poor through to adulthood with all age groups tending to make a false identification. Confidence was higher when participants made correct than incorrect decisions for both types of lineup and this did not change with increasing age. Given these results, both child and adult earwitness evidence needs to be treated with considerable caution.

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