Abstract: The phenomena of children's false memory of sentences in textual context such as developmental reversal and effect of elaborative inferences were explored by employing recognition paradigm in which 95 participants from 3 different age groups were tested on their recognition involving 4 types of sentences, namely, previously-learned, broadly-inferred, strictly-inferred and irrelevant sentences after studying 3 Chinese texts. Several results evolved from this study:(1) Both the rate of accurate recognition of previously-learned sentences and the corrected rate of false recognition of lure sentences of Grade 2 students in senior high school were significantly higher than those of Grade 5 students in elementary school and those of Grade 2 students in junior middle school while no such differences were found regarding the latter two age groups; (2) The rate of false recognition of broadly-inferred sentences was higher than that of strictly-inferred ones in all the aforementioned groups, especially true for Grade 2 students in senior high school. Several conclusions could be drawn from the foregoing results:(1) Developmental reversals in false memories of sentences take place in the three age groups of children in spite of the growth of veridical memories of sentences. Besides, false memories develop relatively faster in the period between the second year in junior high school and the second year in senior high school. (2) False memory of sentences in textual context could be significantly influenced by the categories of elaborative inferences which are made on the basis of the top-down process of activating general world knowledge and accordingly more false memories are activated by broad inferences than strict ones.

Key words: false memory of sentences, developmental reversal, elaborative inferences, top-down process of activation