Resumen de Mother-Child Conversations About the Past: Relationships of Style and Memory Over Time
Elaine Reese, Catherine A. Haden, Robyn Fivush
This study investigated long-term consistency and change in maternal style for talk about the past and relationships of those styles with children's memory participation. Nineteen white, middle-class mother-child dyads talked about shared past events at four time points: when children were 40, 46, 58, and 70 months of age. Across the four time points, individual mothers could be consistently classified as high elaborative (e.g., they elaborated on event information much more often than they repeated their requests) or low elaborative (e.g., they elaborated less often in relation to their repetitions). However, all mothers became more elaborative over time; children also remembered more over time. Cross-lagged correlations revealed a relationship between maternal elaborativeness at the early time points and children's later memory responding, but by the later time points, direction of influence between maternal elaborations and children's memory responding had become bidirectional. These results are framed with respect to the importance of shared past event conversations for the development of children's autobiographical memory.
