Individual differences and consistency in maternal talk style during joint story encoding and retrospection: Associations with children’s long-term recall

Abstract

The manner in which parents and children reminisce about personal events has received increasing attention over the last decade as it has important implications for children’s memory performance. How individual differences in maternal talk style relate to children’s story recall is less clear. The present study examined stylistic consistencies and changes between initial mother-child online encoding of a story event (T₁) and between mother-child retrospections about the same story event 4 months later (T₂), 8 months later (T₃), and 12 months later (T₄). Twenty-four children, 72-months-old at T₁, and their mothers participated. During story encoding, mothers could be classi” ed as high or low elaborative. Relative differences between these maternal groups endured over time. Children of high elaborative mothers contributed more story information than children of low elaborative mothers at each of the four time points. Constraints and implications of the study are discussed.