I think people discussing language changing the way we remember things are onto something. This difference might make it difficult to access memories from befor

I think people discussing language changing the way we remember things are onto something. This difference might make it difficult to access memories from before we could talk. It seems to me that we can go a layer deeper than words and language. An infant has an incredibly shallow model of the world in their brain. At birth, it is almost entirely blank. As we become toddlers, we build up our model of the world at an astonishing rate. I wonder if it most memories don't survive this process. Perhaps the world model grows too quickly, and the old memories are unable to be integrated. I do agree that language plays a role in this, but I would guess that most of this happens at a level beneath language. At some point though, the existing model is robust enough that new memories more firmly take root and can be better integrated into future changes of the model (even though it is still being developed at a rapid rate throughout childhood). Naturally, this point occurs at different ages.