Children's Organization and Recall of Information in Scripted Narratives

Abstract

MISTRY, JAYANTHI J., and LANGE, GARRETT W. Children's Organization and Recall of Information in Scripted Narratives. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 953-961. The present research was designed to examine children's use of preacquired script knowledge in recalling newly presented objects and events embedded within strongly and weakly scripted story narratives. In contrast to previous investigations of children's recall for the events and episodes of stories, the study focused on children's recall of taxonomically related object labels under script-cue, category-cue, and no-cue retrieval conditions. 60 5-year-old and 48 10-year-old children heard 3 stories, each containing 3 target objects from each of 3 taxonomic categories. Age (2) x story type (2) x retrieval cue (3) analyses of object recall showed that younger children received greater benefit than older children from strongly scripted (relative to weakly scripted) story presentations and from the constrained category-cue and script-cue retrieval conditions. Category cues produced greater category clustering, and script cues produced greater story clustering. Under the no-cue condition, both age groups clustered recall more by story than by taxonomic category when objects were presented in strongly scripted stories.