ABSTRACT
Research on parent-child talk about the past has shown that the techniques that parents use to engage their children in verbal reminiscing may have long-term effects on children’s autobiographical memory development (Fivush, 1991; Haden, Haine, & Fivush, 1997; McCabe & Peterson, 1991; Reese, Haden, & Fivush, 1993). By engaging their children in talk about the past, parents attach social significance to the sharing of memories and provide a verbal model of how to retrieve memories. Through participation in memory conversations, children learn to relate another person’s representation of a past experience, expressed in language, to their internal memory of the experience. This insight depends on understanding how language is used as a representational medium, how individuals remember, and how one’s own memory is related to others’ (Fivush, 1991; Hudson, 1990; Nelson, 1993; Welch-Ross, 1995).
