AGE AND SCHOOLING EFFECTS IN STORY RECALL AND STORY PRODUCTION

The relative influences of age- and schooling-related experiences on s tory memory and storytelling were examined. Forty kindergarten and 39 Grade 1 children whose birth dates clustered around the cutoff date fo r school entrance listened to and recalled short, 1-episode stories (s tory recall task) and completed other stories (story production task) for which they were given beginning information. Children were tested in fall (at 5.6 years) and spring (at 6.3 years) of the school year an d in spring of the following school year (at 7.3 years). For the story recall task, significant age-related effects were obtained for overal l amount of recall, whereas schooling-related effects in kindergarten were obtained for patterns of recall as a function of causal relations . For the story production task, age-related as well as schooling-rela ted effects of kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 were obtained for st ructural complexity. Age-related effects are attributed to general dev elopment in memory capacity and deployment of cognitive resources, whe reas schooling-related effects are attributed to restructuring of the story representation in memory.