This article reviews recent research on how children organize general script knowledge and memories of specific episodes in memory. First, we discuss developmental issues concerning how children represent single episodes during the initial stages of script acquisition. Research indicates that even very young children quickly grasp the role of variation and invariance in recurring experiences. After only a few varying experiences, children come to expect more variation, but if the initial experiences are invariant they expect that all future occurrences will be the same. However, there are developmental differences in children's ability to 'sort out' a standard script from its variations if a single experience is different from all others during the initial four or five exposures with an event. In the second section we focus on how typical and atypical episodes are remembered after a script is established. Here, there are few developmental differences. Very young children up to adults are better able to recall deviation episodes than episodes that closely follow a script. However, cueing plays an important role in remembering both routine and deviation episodes. In the last section we discuss explanations for developmental differences in children's memory for specific episodes during the initial phases of script acquisition and suggest areas for future research.One of the pervasive questions in psychology is how we come to understand and represent our world. Over the past 20 years, research has amply demonstrated that knowledge of real-world events is schematically organized (Bartlett, 1932;Bobrow and Norman, 1975;Mandler, 1983). Event schemas, or scripts, are defined as spatially-temporally organized sequences that specify the actions, actors, and props most likely and least likely to occur during any given instantiation of an event (Nelson and Gruendel, 1981;Schank and Abelson, 1977). The classic example is the restaurant script; virtually all individuals in our culture know the sequence of activities involved in going to a restaurant: being seated, getting a menu, ordering food, eating, and paying. Moreover, scripts are organized wholes: the instantiation of any one variable constrains the possible instantiations of all other variables. For example, in the restaurant script, if told that food is ordered at a counter, one infers that you order and pay before you sit down, you seat yourself, and most likely clean up the table when you are through. It is in this sense that scripts are dynamic and flexible; they allow us to anticipate and predict events in our world.Yet scripts are also assumed to aid in recall of past experiences. Research on
