Individual differences and consistency in maternal talk style during jointstory encoding and retrospection: Associations with children's long-term recall

The manner in which parents and children reminisce about personal events ha s received increasing attention over the last decade as it has important im plications for children's memory performance. How individual differences in maternal talk style relate to children's story recall is less clear. The p resent study examined stylistic consistencies and changes between initial m other-child online encoding of a story event (T-1) and between mother-child retrospections about the same story event 4 months later (T-2), 8 months l ater (T-3), and 12 months later (T-4). Twenty-four children, 72-months-old at T-1, and their mothers participated. During story encoding, mothers coul d be classified as high or low elaborative. Relative differences between th ese maternal groups endured over time. Children of high elaborative mothers contributed more story information than children of low elaborative mother s at each of the four time points. Constraints and implications of the stud y are discussed.