A Micro-Analytic Approach to Parent-Child Reminiscing

Abstract

The reminiscing literature has for decades highlighted the positive effect of the high elaborative reminiscing style on children’s autobiographical memory. However, very little is known about the direct, reciprocal influences of parents’ and children’s utterances on each other. Using a micro-analytic approach, the current study aimed to investigate a) how likely children were to provide memory information directly following parental elaborative, repetitive, and confirming utterance types, and b) how likely parents were to respond to children’s memory information and verbal placeholders with elaborations, repetitions, and confirmations. Eighty-eight (N = 88) mothers and fathers participated in the study with their 4-year-old children. The micro-analyses revealed that children were most likely to provide memory information directly following parental open-ended elaborative and repetitive questions, and positive confirmations. Thus, through their open-ended questions and confirmations parents promoted the reciprocal, joint process of remembering which appeared highly facilitative of children’s autobiographical remembering.