To have a more accurate understanding of what transpires when children testify, one must consider the discourse requirements of eyewitness testimony, the child's developing ability to produce the requisite discourse, the nature and development of autobiographical memory in children, sociocultural factors that may influence discourse production, and jurors' difficulty in processing the discourse of eyewitness testimony in general, and children's testimony in particular. The psycholinguistic analysis of narrative discourse reveals that narrative discourse production is a skill that children develop over the course of childhood, and that jurors' decisionmaking depends on their narrative processing, which is facilitated by complete and coherent testimony. 86 references