Abstract
To investigate the relationship between recall during early childhood and childhood amnesia, I examined whether some memory-related linguistic abilities are related with the recall of events during early childhood by following seven children from the age of 1-2 for about five to six years. Main results are as follows. First, the children achieved the memory-related linguistic skills in the same order: after being able to report events using past tense, they came to understand verbal recognition questions (“First verbal recognition”), and then to use memory-related verbs spontaneously (“Memory-verb acquisition”). Second, the children after the age of “Memory-verb acquisition” recalled significantly more events than they were before that age. Third, when the children were after the ages of “First verbal recognition” and “Memory-verb acquisition”, they recalled significantly less events experienced before the ages. Developmental transition of autobiographical remembering will be discussed in relation to the onset of childhood amnesia.
