The Role of Narrative Structure in Scaffolding Children’s Recall

Children’s episodic memory improves sharply between 4 and 7 years. Here, we asked whether the developing ability to impose narrative structure on events may be one reason for this change. Children in the U.S. between 4 and 7 years (n = 77) viewed silent cartoons and then gave on-the-fly narration during a second viewing. We coded narrative structure using a well-defined and broadly used system. Children recalled the cartoons after a delay of around 7 days. Initial narrative structure was positively associated with later memory accuracy, measured using either free or cued recall, after controlling for age, verbal knowledge, verbosity, and the number of days between encoding and retrieval. These findings underscore the possible role of narrative structure in scaffolding developments in episodic memory. Young children’s memory may be limited in part by their lack of the semantic knowledge necessary to construct narratives, and/or by their impoverished understanding of narrative structure in general.