The development of children’s early memory skills

Abstract

A multi-task battery tapping nonverbal memory and language skills was used to assess 60 children at 18, 24, and 30 months. Analyses focused on the degree to which language, working memory, and deliberate memory skills were linked concurrently to children's Elicited Imitation performance, and whether the patterns of association varied across the different ages. Language ability emerged as a predictor of immediate Elicited Imitation performance by 24 months and predicted delayed performance at each age. In addition to the contributions of language, the children's abilities to search for and retrieve toys in the deliberate memory task were associated with their immediate Elicited Imitation performance at each age. In addition to language, working memory was positively associated with aspects of both immediate and delayed performance at all ages. The extent to which it was possible to replicate and extend previous cross-sectional work in this longitudinal study is discussed. KeywordsCognitive development; Event memory; Deliberate memory; Nonverbal memory; Language skills; Longitudinal study; Working memory Young children's behavior reveals their abilities to remember long before they can use language to describe their experiences. Evidence from tasks that tap different aspects of nonverbal memory -including conditioning (e.g., Rovee-Collier & Hayne, 2000) and elicited and deferred imitation (e.g., Bauer, Wenner, Dropik, & Wewerka, 2000;Meltzoff, 1995 Correspondence may be addressed to Catherine A. Haden, Department of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, 1032 W. Sheridan Drive, Chicago,. chaden@luc.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript documents clearly the mnemonic competence of infants, as well as substantial improvements with age in various aspects of remembering. Moreover, the literature on early memory that has emerged in the last 20 years has (a) contributed to a reappraisal of the cognitive competencies of infants, (b) suggested continuities across development in the operation of basic memory systems, (c) fostered explorations of critical constructs such as reinstatement, and (d) provided a foundation for addressing long-standing controversies such as infantile amnesia (see Bauer, 2006, for a review).Given these important contributions, as well as the fact that children's nonverbal memory skills may provide a platform for their later use of language to report the past (see Bauer, 2007;Ornstein, Haden, & San Souci, 2008), it is surprising that our unders...

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