No abstract

Even very young children are capable of recalling past events. Previous research has indicated that children are learning the appropriate forms for talking about the past in conversations with adults. However, exactly what young children remember and how consistent their recall is from time to time is less clear. We investigated these questions by comparing the content of 30-to 35-month-old children's memories for events experienced during two separate interviews with their mother, two interviews with a stranger, or one interview with their mother and one with a stranger. Two major findings emerged. First, children recalled more accurate information when conversing with the stranger than with their mother. Second, although we found more consistency in children's recall when conversing with the same adult across the two interviews than when conversing with a different adult, children's recall was highly inconsistent overall. Children overwhelmingly remembered different, but still accurate information on the second interview. Implications of these findings for early autobiographical memory and for childhood amnesia are discussed.Conversations about past events play an important role in social interaction. Somewhat surprisingly, even very young children are able to participate in such conversations, and are able to provide accurate information about the event under discussion (Fivush, Gray, & Fromhoff, 1987;Todd & Perlmutter, 1980). But being able to recount past experiences involves more than simply remembering details about the event in question: Children must also learn how to talk about past events in a conventionalized form in order to communicate effectively to another what transpired. In adult-child conversations about the past, it is often the adult who provides much of the content and structure of the recall. In fact, it . We are grateful to the parents and children who participated in this research, and to Fayne A. Fromhoff, who helped in the data collection and coding. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their careful reading and thoughtful comments on the manuscript.Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Robyn Fivush,