This supports the concept that the relationship between language and autobiographical memory is a strictly human phenomenon and can potentially be obtained during even early childhood.
Freud had first "discovered" and purposed infantile amnesia, "I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives and fail to find in it a strange riddle" (Sigmund, 1915). Freud noted, "the remarkable amnesia of childhood" referring to the inability of adults to recall events that would have taken place roughly between the ages of 2 and 4 (Science Channel). Nelson explains theories that suggest although children have the ability to recall memories between these ages, this ability declines as the child becomes older and grows into adulthood. Nelson then begins to outline how this concept is contradictory to such theories purposed by psychologists such as Ernest G. Schachtel and Ulric Neisser (Katherine, 1993). Schachtel and Neisser both suggested that autobiographic memory relies on each individual's unique reconstructive process in which they organize their thoughts and behaviors known as their Schema. This mental structure that is schema consists of a series of preconceived ideas and framework that would clearly differ between childhood and adulthood. Adults think differently than children do due to a more mature schema, this means adults organize thoughts, behaviors, and belief systems differently than when they were children. It would not exactly be fair to compare the same definition of autobiographical memory to the differing stages of human development. In essence, self-perspective of autobiographical memory is in the eye of the beholder and differs with age.
Burner's Three Modes of Representation reinforces the concept that even from infancy through early childhood humans may have the potential to demonstrate autobiographical memory since for they still possess representational abilities.