The influence of talking on showing and telling: adult‐child talk and children's verbal and nonverbal event recall

Abstract

Although adult-child discussion during an event has been shown to influence children's verbal recall, limited research has investigated its influence on nonverbal recall, particularly in the early school years. The current experiment addressed this gap. Sixty-five 5-to 6-year old children participated in a staged, novel event and were interviewed about it 2 weeks later. The 4 experimental conditions varied as to whether the children experienced empty or elaborative adult-child talk during the event and whether, during the memory interview, verbal recall preceded re-enactment (verbal-first) or re-enactment preceded verbal recall (nonverbal-first). Replicating previous findings, elaborative talk increased the correct information in verbal recall. Moreover, elaborative talk increased the amount and accuracy of the information re-enacted and reduced the errors made. Interview order did not influence the results. The findings extend theory and research by demonstrating that by age 5 years, elaborative talk influences not only verbal but also nonverbal recall.The way in which adults and young children discuss an event as it occurs has a powerful influence on the children's recall of that experience. This conclusion is drawn from a strong body of research conducted across the preschool and early school years, using both naturalistic and experimental research paradigms. For example Tessler and Nelson (1994) found that only those aspects of the events that had been jointly discussed by preschoolaged children and their mothers during a museum visit and picture-taking walk were subsequently recalled by the child. Similarly, Haden, Ornstein, Eckerman, and Didow (2001) showed that those components of staged events that were discussed by mothers and their 2.5-to 3.5-year-old children as the events took place were better remembered by the children than were components mentioned only by the mother or not discussed at all. Moreover, findings suggest that the relationship between mother-child discussion during an event and children's recall is causal. We (McGuigan & Salmon, 2004) demonstrated that, when compared to empty, uninformative talk (e.g. 'now we are going to do this'), elaborative experimenter-child talk (in which all aspects of the event were described and the child's participation was encouraged) facilitated 3-and 5-year-old children's recall of a

Narratives with Robots: The Impact of Interaction Context and Individual Differences on Story Recall and Emotional Understanding

“…We followed the coding scheme used in previous research by McGuigan and Salmon (2006) and McCartney and Nelson (1981), in which participants' verbal responses to open-ended questions were coded for the presence or absence of core characters (e.g., Leo, Berry) and core ideas (e.g., Leo does not know anyone, everyone is staring at Leo's clothes). This score provides a snapshot of the participants' "ability to logically recount the fundamental plot elements of the story. "…”

Training Mothers in Elaborative Reminiscing Enhances Children’s Autobiographical Memory and Narrative

“…Children of trained mothers later recalled more descriptive details, and marginally more features, from the event compared with children of untrained mothers. McGuigan and Salmon (2006) also demonstrated the benefits of elaborative encoding for children's nonverbal memory in the form of behavioral re-enactment. These studies verify that an adult's elaborative style during an event can increase the accuracy and volume of children's autobiographical memories, but they did not assess the role of an elaborative reminiscing style.…”

Emotional Storytelling in the Classroom

“…For Narrative Structure Score (NSS), we followed the coding scheme used in previous research by McGuigan and Salmon [24] and McCartney and Nelson [23], in which participants' verbal responses to open-ended questions were coded for the presence or absence of core characters (e.g., Leo, Berry) and core ideas (e.g., Leo doesn't know anyone, everyone is staring at Leo's clothes). This score provides a snapshot of the participants' "ability to logically recount the fundamental plot elements of the story" [24,23].…”