Semantic binding, not attentional control, generates coherent global structure in children's narrative memory

Abstract

Encoding and retrieving global narrative structure influences children's narrative recall. The influence of age and attentional/executive resources on binding processes during sentence list recall was examined in 5- to 6- and 8- to 9-year-old children. Older and younger children showed superior recall of lists, and achieved higher scores on two metrics of chunking; access to different sentences (i.e., number of chunks) and sentence completion (i.e., chunk size), when lists were presented within a coherent global structure. Children's list recall and sentence access, but not their sentence completion scores, were affected by a concurrent self-paced attention-demanding task. Children, unlike adults, engage in active storage of verbal information in thematically related sentence lists. The coherence-advantage effect was stable across age groups and insensitive to the secondary task. Overall, findings imply that semantic binding generates stronger memory representations and superior recall for sentences within a story context than for sentence sets that lack global narrative structure.

Keywords:

• Chunking
• Development
• Narrative memory

Acknowledgments

This work was carried out at the University of Bristol, UK, while the first author was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council studentship. We are grateful for the constructive comments from reviewers.