Chapter 11 - Developmental Pathways to Skilled Remembering

Summary

This chapter examines the development of children’s verbal event memory skills across early childhood. A multi-method approach to the study of children’s developing memory skills and the ways in which these skills are socialized through conversations about the present and past are described. Particular emphasis is placed on characterizing the development of children’s verbal event memory skills across two primary tasks and over time, and most importantly, linking this development to detailed analyses of the social-communicative exchanges that children have with parents and other adults. The primary contributions of this work include the use of microanalytic assessments of parent–child conversations that underscore the unique importance of elaborative Wh-questions and evidence of the clear causal connections between elaborative language and children’s memory reports.