Developmental Changes in Memory-Related Linguistic Skills and Their Relationship to Episodic Recall in Children

Maternal reminiscing as critical to emotion socialization

Background

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the central importance of socioemotional skills in positive child development has become even more apparent. Prevalent models of emotion socialization emphasize the importance of parent-child talk as a critical socialization context.

Purpose

Autobiographical reminiscing about the child's lived experience may be a particularly effective form of parent-child conversation that facilitates emotion understanding.

Method

The authors provide a theoretical and empirical review of how maternal reminiscing style impacts specifically on emotion socialization in both typically and atypically developing children.

Results

Individual differences in maternal reminiscing indicate that highly elaborative reminiscing is related to both better narrative skills and higher levels of emotion understanding and regulation both concurrently and longitudinally. Intervention studies indicate that mothers can be coached to be more elaborative during reminiscing and coaching leads to higher levels of emotion understating and regulation.

Conclusions

Reminiscing about lived experience allows mothers and children to explore and examine emotions in personally meaningful situations that have real world implications for children's evolving emotion understanding.

What about "space" is important for episodic memory?

Early cognitive neuroscientific research revealed that the hippocampus is crucial for spatial navigation in rodents, and for autobiographical episodic memory in humans. Researchers quickly linked these streams to propose that the human hippocampus supports memory through its role in representing space, and research on the link between spatial cognition and episodic memory in humans has proliferated over the past several decades. Different researchers apply the term "spatial" in a variety of contexts, however, and it remains unclear what aspect of space may be critical to memory. Similarly, "episodic" has been defined and tested in different ways. Naturalistic assessment of spatial memory and episodic memory (i.e., episodic autobiographical memory) is required to unify the scale and biological relevance in comparisons of spatial and mnemonic processing. Limitations regarding the translation of rodent to human research, human ontogeny, and inter-individual variability require greater consideration in the interpretation of this literature. In this review, we outline the aspects of space that are (and are not) commonly linked to episodic memory, and then we discuss these dimensions through the lens of individual differences in naturalistic autobiographical memory. Future studies should carefully consider which aspect(s) of space are being linked to memory within the context of naturalistic human cognition. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory.

Trajectory of auditory and language development in the early stages of pre-lingual children post cochlear implantation: A longitudinal follow up study

OBJECTIVES

The aim of this longitudinal follow-up study was to explore the trajectories of early auditory and language development in Mandarin speaking children younger than 3 years of age following switch-on of their cochlear implants (CIs).

METHODS

Early auditory and language development was measured longitudinally using the Infant-Toddler Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale (IT-MAIS), which is a commonly used tool for assessing early prelingual auditory development (EPLAD) in children, and the subtest (Words and Gestures, W&G) of the simplified short form version of the Mandarin Communicative Development Inventory (SSF-MCDI) to assess receptive and expressive vocabulary growths of children in 24 pediatric cochlea implant recipients at baseline, 3, 6, and 12 months following switch-on. Age at switch-on ranged from 1 to 3 years of age. Participants were divided into two groups based on age at switch-on. The IT-MAIS and SSF-MCDI (W&G) scores were analyzed with comparison to normal children, unaided hearing-impaired children, and CI children.

RESULTS

Significant improvements in IT-MAIS and SSF-MCDI (W&G) scores from baseline to 12 months were seen after switch-on in both CI groups and were comparable to the normal hearing children in the first year of age. The IT-MAIS scores of CI children in both groups at 12 months after switch-on surpassed the average level of unaided peers with profound hearing loss and were similar to the average level of unaided peers with mild hearing loss. SSF-MCDI (W&G) scores in word comprehension and expression were significantly different between groups at some intervals.

CONCLUSIONS

Children younger than 3 years of age with cochlear implants have similar trajectories in early auditory and language developments to normally hearing children. Moreover, early implantation is an important factor for the early auditory development when comparing EPLAD results between CI children and unaided peers with different hearing loss. Finally, it is noteworthy that CI children master the skill of word comprehension before the skill of word expression, and that word comprehension may be the basis of word expression.