Children's recall of contextually integrable and nonintegrable episodic events

Abstract

The hypothesis of this study is that children's deficiency in encoding input information may be attributed partially to a failure to fully integrate target and contextual information. Second and fourth grade children and college adults were shown sentences varying in internal integrability in a cued recall task for target nouns in the sentences. The sentences were internally semantically Congruous, Incongruous, or Anomalous. In acquisition, the subjects were told either to read the sentences (Read Encoding) or to rate the likelihood of the occurrence of the sentential event (Integration Encoding). The results showed large developmental differences in both levels of recall and the Congruity effect (superior recall for the Congruous relative to the Anomalous sentences) in the Read condition. These differences were minimized in the Integration condition. These patterns suggest young children are deficient in the contextual integration of episodic events, and, as a result, make inefficient use of semantic information in the encoding of input information.