Comparing the effects of drawing and verbal recall techniques on children's memory accounts.

The present study compared the amount and accuracy of information Taiwanese children reported about a staged event in verbal-only and drawing-assisted interviews. We also tested further whether verbosity was a valid indicator of the accuracy of children's memory reports (Koriat & Goldsmith, , ) in a non-Western sample. Eighty-four first-grade elementary school children participated in a staged event involving a novel interactive puppet show followed by a drawing activity (drawing of the target event or the school), and were subsequently given a 10-minute memory interview. They were randomly assigned to a verbal cued-recall interview condition or a drawing-assisted interview condition. We did not find significant differences in the amount and accuracy of details reported between the two interview conditions. Our findings also revealed that the quantity of children's reports was positively related to the number of correct details reported, indicating that the children in our study did not demonstrate a quantity-accuracy tradeoff.