What's your earliest childhood memory? Can you remember learning to walk? Or talk? The first time you 【C1】______ thunder or watched a television program? Adults seldom 【C2】______ events much earlier than the year or so before entering school, just as children younger than three or four 【C3】______ retain any specific, personal experiences. A variety of explanations have been 【C4】______ by psychologists for this 'childhood amnesia' (儿童失忆症). One argues that the hippocampus, the region of the brain which is 【C5】______ for forming memories, does not mature until about the age of two. But the most popular theory 【C6】______ that, since adults do not think like children, they cannot 【C7】______ childhood memories. Adults think in words, and their life memories are like stories — one 【C8】______ follows another as in a novel or film. But when they search through their mental 【C9】______ for early childhood memories to 【C10】______ to this verbal life story, they don't find any that fits tile 【C11】______ . It's like trying to find a Chinese word in an English dictionary. Now psychologist Annette Simms of the New York State University offers a new 【C12】______ for childhood amnesia. She argues that there 【C13】______ aren't any early childhood memories to recall. According to Dr. Simms, children need to learn to use someone else's spoken 【C14】______ of their personal experiences in order to turn their own short-term, quickly forgotten impressions of them into 【C15】______ memories. In other 【C16】______ , children have to talk about their experiences and hear others talk about 【C17】______ — Mother talking about the afternoon 【C18】______ looking for seashells at the beach or Dad asking them about their day at Ocean Park. 【C19】______ this verbal reinforcement, says Dr. Simms, children cannot form. 【C20】______ memories of their personal experiences. 【C1】