Twenty economically disadvantaged preschoolers (mean age 3;7) were randomly assigned to an intervention or a control group, and their mothers' styles of eliciting narratives from their children were assessed before and after intervention. Mothers of intervention children were encouraged to spend more time in narrative conversation, ask more open-ended and context-eliciting questions, and encourage longer narratives through back-channel responses. Children's narrative and vocabulary skills were assessed before and after the year-long intervention and 14 children participated in a follow-up assessment a year later. Narrative measures included the number and length of narratives as well as how decontextualized and informative they were. Intervention children showed significant vocabulary improvement immediately after intervention terminated, and a year later they showed overall improvements in narrative skill. In particular, intervention children produced more context-setting descriptions about where and especially when the described events took place. Such decontextualized language has been emphasized as important for literacy acquisition.

We examined how 67 parent-child dyads talked about 2 emotionally laden events: an injury resulting in emergency room treatment and an individually nominated, positively valenced experience. Group differences were found in parental reminiscing between positive and negative events such that parents asked a higher proportion of open-ended memory questions in conversations about negative experiences and a higher proportion of yes-no questions in conversations about positive experiences. Also, parents focused more on emotion when discussing positive experiences with their children and more on causal explanations during the negative conversations. However, individual parents were consistent across event types in both reminiscing style and content. Finally, parental reminiscing style was correlated with children's recall for both types of events such that parents with an elaborative style had children who reported more new information during the conversations. Implications for children coping with stressful experiences as well as future research are discussed.Everyday we experience an array of emotional events both positive and negative, and we talk about these experiences with others. Reminiscing about emotional events helps us to understand and evaluate our past. As adults, the ability to talk about one's personal past seems effortless, but children need to learn how to convey their life stories to make them comprehensible to the listener. Often for very JOURNAL OF

Children between 2 and 13 years who suffered traumatic injury necessitating hospital emergency room treatment were recruited as subjects. They (and adult witnesses) were interviewed a few days and 6 months later, using free and probed recall, about both injury and hospital treatment. Children at all ages were able to provide considerable information about both stressful events, although the amount of detail increased with age. They also made few commission errors. Surprisingly, children's distress at time of injury did not affect the amount or accuracy of their recall of that event, whereas distress during hospital treatment did decrease recall. A tripartite classification into 3 categories of detail was used: central, peripheral--inside the emotional events, or peripheral--outside those events. Children's recall differed depending upon detail category. Implications for children's testimony are discussed.

Children who had been 2±13 years of age at the time of a medical emergency (an injury serious enough to require hospital ER treatment) were re-interviewed about their injury and treatment ®ve years after injury, and three years after a previous interview. The children showed excellent recall of the central components of their injury experience, although their recall of hospital treatment was more incomplete. Thus, both the nature of the event being recalled (the injury versus the hospital treatment) and the centrality of information (central versus peripheral) were important. The recall of 2-year-olds, although not as good as that of children just a year older, did not ®t with predictions of infantile amnesia since they recalled a considerable amount about their injury. High stress levels at the time of the target experiences had little effect on the highly memorable injury event, but seemed to facilitate children's recall of central components of the hospital eventÐthe event that they had a harder time remembering. Implications for eyewitness testimony are discussed.

This study investigated the influence of question format on preschool-aged children's errors, their response accuracy, and their tendency to say "I don't know" when given non-misleading questions in a neutral, unbiased context. Children (3 to 5 years old) participated in a craft-making session that included a staged "accident" with two experimenters differing in gender and appearance; the environment also had several distinctive features. One week later children were interviewed about actions, participants, and environment; questions were yes/no format with the veridical response "yes" ("yes" questions), yes/no format with the veridical response "no" ("no" questions), and specific wh-format questions. Question format substantially influenced children's responses: they were most likely to make errors if asked "no" questions, and were unlikely to answer either yes/no question with "I don't know." In contrast, children spontaneously and frequently said "I don't know" to wh-questions about content they did not recall (environment), but not about content that was well recalled (actions). Implications of question format for reliability of eyewitness testimony by preschoolers are discussed.With the burgeoning participation of preschoolers in police investigations and in courtrooms as witnesses, increased attention is being paid to how well children this young can recall and accurately report on events for which they were eyewitnesses. A number of investigators have suggested that preschoolers can in fact recall a great deal of information accurately (

The ability to produce decontextualized language is a crucial skill underlying literacy acquisition. This study investigated the role of parental interaction styles on children's developing skill at providing contextual orientation in one type of decontextualized discourse, personal experience narratives. A researcher elicited narratives monthly for 18 months from 10 children age 26-43 months. At intervals, mothers were asked to tape record "talk about past events" with their children. The children's increasing skill at independently providing context about when and where was correlated with mothers' frequencies of using specific types of prompts in their narrative elicitations. Cross-lagged correlations showed that parents who frequently prompted for context orientation had children who most frequently provided subsequent orientation to when and where in their stand-alone narratives when they were over 3 years of age. Results were interpreted in terms of Vygotskian theory.Discourse skills have been identified as central components of successful school achievement by a number of investigators (

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Long-term recall of medical emergencies (including both injury and hospital treatment) by 2- to 13-year-olds was assessed 2 years after injury. Event identity was important: Children recalled injury details better than hospital treatment. Ninety-six children were interviewed 3 times prior to the 2-year recall; amount recalled decreased only for hospital treatment details, although accuracy of recall decreased for both injury and treatment. Twenty-one children were interviewed only twice prior to the 2-year interview. An extra interview 1 year after their injury had little effect on how much older children recalled about both injury and treatment or how much younger children recalled about injury details, but it helped younger children recall the less memorable hospital event. The extra interview also helped all children maintain accuracy when recalling hospital details but was unnecessary for the more memorable injury event. Implications for children's testimony are discussed.