Relation Between Parental Conversational Style and Preschoolers' Recognition Memory: The Role of Metacognition

Forty-nine parent-child dyads were recruited to examine the link between parental conversational style and preschoolers' recognition memory and metacognition (i.e., confidence judgment and use of the memorability heuristic). Each dyad participated in a shared staged activity and then discussed about it. Parental conversational style was analyzed focusing on both the interactions' structure and the content addressed. Then, separately from the parent-child conversation, children's memory and metacognition were assessed through a story-recall task (i.e., true-false recognition for both memorable and less memorable story items while rating their level of confidence). Results showed that some components of structure (concretizations with few repetitions) and content (interaction between metamemory talk and episodic richness) were related to preschoolers' accuracy of memory decisions and confidence judgments (i.e., metacognitive monitoring). By documenting the relation between parental conversational style and preschoolers' metacognitive skills, this study provides promising avenues for explaining the processes whereby preschoolers' memory is influenced.