Eighty-eight 6-year-olds and 88 10-year-olds took part, in pairs, in a contrived interaction with a "magician." The children were interviewed 10 days and 10 weeks later in 1 of 4 conditions: no cues, context cues, relevant cues, and irrelevant cues. Older children recalled more accurate information than younger children, and both groups recalled more accurate information after the short than the long delay. Although relevant cues facilitated free recall, accuracy did not differ across cue conditions. Younger children were less likely to report an accident they had been asked to keep secret than were older children. Children's understanding of truth and lies did not predict errors in free recall or their reporting of the secret.Questions concerning the reliability and content of children's event reports have assumed particular importance as children are increasingly being called on to give eyewitness testimony in legal contexts. The question of when children give reliable reports is especially significant when they are the only eyewitnesses, such as in cases of child sexual abuse. Early studies have led to the general conclusion that children were unreliable and suggestible witnesses (Brown, 1926;Burtt, 1948;Goodman, 1984;Ross, 1908). However, it has become clear that this characterization is too simplistic and that the nature of developmental changes in children's eyewitness accounts of events may depend on several factors, including the methods of eliciting the account (Goodman & Reed, 1986;Marin, Holmes, Guth, & Kovac, 1979), the nature and familiarity of the event (Farrar & Goodman, 1990;Hudson, 1990;Hudson & Nelson, 1986), and whether children were participants in the event or observers of it (Rudy & Goodman, 1991). In particular, previous studies have indicated that for free recall of events, even quite young children may be as accurate as older children and adults (Goodman, Aman, & Hirschman, 1987;Goodman & Reed, 1986;Marin et al., 1979). Typically, however, the free-recall reports of young children are far less complete than those of older children (Goodman et al., 1987) and may be too brief to be useful if not augmented by, for example, more specific questions.The relative brevity of children's reports may in part be due to a difficulty in retrieving information that has been encoded

One hundred twenty-eight 5- to 7-year-old children were interviewed using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Investigative Interview Protocol about an event staged 4 to 6 weeks earlier. Children were prepared for talking about the investigated event using either an invitational or directive style of prompting, with or without additional practice describing experienced events. The open invitation prompts (including those using children's words to encourage further reporting) elicited more detailed responses than the more focused directive prompts without reducing accuracy. Children were most responsive when they had received preparation that included practice describing experienced events in response to invitation prompts. Overall, children were highly accurate regardless of prompt type. Errors mostly related to peripheral rather than central information and were more likely to be elicited by directive or yes/no questions than by invitations. Children who provided accounts when asked about a false event were less accurate when describing the true event. Children who received preparation that included practice recalling a recent event in response to directive and yes/no questions were least accurate when questioned about the false event first. The data provide the first direct evaluation of the accuracy of information elicited using different prompt types in the course of NICHD Protocol interviews, and underscore the importance of how children are prepared for subsequent reporting.

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The authors examined the effects of reinstating objects from an event on 6-and 9-year-old children's reports of the event in which they had either participated or observed. Half of the 95 children were interviewed twice, 10 days and 10 weeks after the event (Group 1), and the remaining children were interviewed a single time, 10 weeks after (Group 2). Following free recall, prompted recall and direct questions were accompanied by objects from the event and distractors for half the children. The effect of the delay on free recall was ameliorated by the prior interview for older but not younger children. Objects attenuated age differences in prompted recall for participants and enhanced accuracy in response to questions. Objects also led to more errors at the long delay. Analyses based on signal detection theory indicated that both response strategy and memory-related factors contributed to developmental changes in compliance with misleading questions.It is now widely recognized that children cannot be categorized as competent or incompetent witnesses on the basis of age alone. Many factors influence children's accounts of events, and an interactional perspective on children's eye witness testimony, according to which the skills demonstrated by the child are jointly determined by the child and the environmental context, is beginning to emerge. Such a perspective highlights the importance of the interviewer's behavior (e.g., Stellar, 1991) which, in turn, points to the need to develop innovative interviewing techniques so that "children can be empowered to become their most reliable selves" (McGough, 1991, p. 167). In recent studies, a number of procedures designed to improve children's event reports have been examined, including interviewer style