Development of semantic knowledge in children's associative false memory

In the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure, false recall of a word that was not presented (the critical-lure) can be produced when participants study a list of associative words related to the critical-lure. Recently, some studies using the DRM procedure showed that young children did not produce false recall. The present study hypothesized that the children did not produce false recall in those studies because the lists of words did not reflect the children's associative knowledge. To test this possibility, the present study developed lists that reflect the associative knowledge of five-year-old children and examined false recall using the DRM procedure. The results showed that children falsely recalled the critical-lure after studying the lists that reflected the children's associative knowledge, while they did not recall the critical-lure after studying the lists that reflected adults' associative knowledge. The results indicate that children produce false recall when the lists of words reflect those children's associative knowledge. The present finding suggests that the structuring of semantic knowledge that mediates false recall of the critical-lure has developed five years of age.