Examining Children’s Memory Performance: The Role of Parents’ and Children’s Metacognitive Talk During Reminiscence and Play

ABSTRACT

Recent research has highlighted the critical role in children’s cognitive development of the metacognitive support parents give their children during everyday interactions. Our main goal was to examine whether parents made consistent use of metacognitive talk across different parent – child interaction contexts and to document the effect of this metacognitive talk across contexts on preschoolers’ memory. The relation between children’s and parents’ metacognitive talk was also examined, along with the link between children’s metacognitive talk and their own memory performance. 64 Belgian preschooler – parent dyads (M_age = 40.3 months) were invited to play memory games together and to reminisce about a standardized event. In both contexts, parents’ and children’s utterances were analyzed for their metacognitive content. Children’s episodic memory was assessed through a story-recall task. Results revealed that, in terms of frequency of use, parents exhibited a somewhat consistent metacognitive style across contexts. The nature of the metacognitive comments that were produced, however, varied depending on the context. Moreover, parents’ consistent production of higher rates of metacognitive comments in both contexts was found to be associated with better memory performance in children. Our data also revealed that children’s tendency to make metacognitive comments was related to their parents’ metacognitive production and to their own memory performance. By documenting the relations between parents’ and children’s metacognitive talk and the effect on children’s memory, this study provides promising avenues for a better understanding of how metacognitive processes might be involved in early memory development.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S. – FNRS) grant to MG. The F.R.S. – FNRS had no role in study design; the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; the writing of the report; or the decision to submit the article for publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The URL is https://hdl.handle.net/2268/315487.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at https://hdl.handle.net/2268/315487

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Marion Gardier and Christina Léonard (jointly first author): Investigation, Project Administration, Formal Analysis, Writing – Original draft, Review and Editing. Christina Léonard and Marie Geurten: Methodology and Conceptualization. Marie Geurten: Formal Analysis; Validation; Supervision; Writing – Review and Editing; Funding acquisition.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS).