Narrative Skills, Gender, Culture, and Children’s Long-Term Memory Accuracy of a Staged Event

Abstract

This study examined the extent to which school-aged children's general narrative skills provide cognitive benefits for accurate remembering or enable good storytelling that undermines memory accuracy. European American and Chinese American 6-year-old boys and girls (N = 114) experienced a staged event in the laboratory and were asked to tell a story from a picture book that accessed their narrative skill.Children were interviewed about the staged event 6 months later to assess memory accuracy. Greater narrative skill when storytelling was associated with decreased free recall and recognition memory accuracy for the staged event. In free recall responses, this effect was driven by an increase in the likelihood that inaccurate details would be included in responses from children with better general narrative skills. For girls only, narrative skill predicted poorer recognition accuracy. Girls were also more language-proficient and provided more correct details in free recall than did boys. Chinese American children were more accurate than European American children when responding to recall prompts due to less frequent provision of incorrect details, particularly in girls. Findings are discussed in light of the roles of socialization in memory-reporting accuracy.Narrative skills are critical for the development of personal event memory. At a broad level, theorists have argued that narratives enhance memory through facilitation of conversation about the past (Bauer, 2007;Nelson & Fivush, 2004). The development of narrative skills allows children to discuss past experiences with others, and in so doing, they further rehearse a specific event's contents. During the process of narrative interaction, children also learn what event elements are important to remember and how to structure their memories into a form that can later aid with recall. According to the basicsystems model of episodic memory (Rubin, 2006), the temporal and causal structures created through narratives, like those captured through measures of cohesion and coherence, provide a critical framework that can be used to retain episodic information in memory. Through these narrative interactions, children further learn social-cultural expectations about personal storytelling (Nelson & Fivush, 2004;Wang, 2013). Notably, previous research has largely focused on the links between narrative skills and the amount of information that is recalled. Empirical evidence demonstrating benefits of narrative skills for episodic memory accuracy, including how this association varies by gender and culture, is surprisingly limited.

Individual Differences in Children’s Suggestibility: An Updated Review

“…In terms of findings regarding the contributions of demographic factors to children's suggestibility, there remains no convincing evidence to suggest that either a child's SES or their gender is likely to affect their susceptibility to suggestion. The latter is somewhat surprising given documented gender differences in language and recall (Flannagan & Baker-Ward, 1996;Haden, Haine, & Fivush, 1997;Herlitz & Rehnman, 2008;Klemfuss & Wang, 2017;Reese & Fivush, 1993), but supports prior evidence regarding suggestibility and inaccuracy (Bruck & Melnyk, 2004). There was one study representing a new perspective on individual differences by showing evidence of cultural differences in suggestibility.…”

The development of narrative skills in Turkish-speaking children: A complexity approach

“…Child gender is considered to play a role in how parents and children narrate about past events or in shared book-reading activities [40,41]. However, it is mostly ignored in studies on fictitious narratives [5,6,7,37].…”

The influence of culture on children’s immediate and delayed retrieval

“…To complement this body of research, it is also important to examine the accuracy of children’s memory reports. This could have significant implications in applied settings that demand children to provide accurate accounts of their experiences (e.g., classroom, forensic and investigative interviews) (Klemfuss & Wang, 2017; Qi & Roberts, 2019). However, it is challenging for researchers to measure what exactly happened in autobiographical events, which precludes them from objectively evaluating memory accuracy.…”

“…The extant developmental studies investigated cultural variations in memory recall with children aged 4 to 14 years old (e.g., Han et al, 1998; Klemfuss & Wang, 2017; Peterson et al, 2009). We recruited 7‐ to 10‐year‐old children in the present study for two reasons.…”