A grandmother attempts to teach her four-year-old granddaughter the multiplication tables using simple repetition, but they repeatedly start over at 'three fives'; the child keeps coming up with 'thirty-five'. We consider three possible explanations: self-perpetuating frequency of behavior, saliency of memory and Vygotsky's next or proximal zones…

Tested predictions of infantile amnesia theory compared with social-interactionist account of autobiographical memory. Found maternal reminiscing style and self-recognition when child was 19 months old uniquely predicted children's shared memory reports across time, even with children's initial language and nonverbal memory factored out.…

Forty 3.5- to 4.5-year-olds discussed past events with their mothers and completed tasks indexing their ability to reason about conflicting mental representations and understanding of knowledge. Found that theory-of-mind scores were related to memory conversation participation, independent of age and linguistic skill, and to the frequency of…

Examined relationship between mother-child conversational interactions when children were 30, 36, and 42 months old and children's recall of these activities 1 day and 3 weeks later. Found that at all ages, features of activities jointly handled and jointly discussed were remembered better than features jointly handled but discussed by mother only…

Examined associations between parent language complexity and conversational style and child language use. Contrasted parents' story reading language style with their style for free play with toys and joint remembering of an event. Findings underscore the extent to which children's conversational ability is shaped by the demands of the social and…