Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/ abstract_S030500090000163XHow to cite this article: M. J. Homzie and Carol B. Gravitt (1977). Children's reproductions: effects of event order and implied vs. directly stated causation. ABSTRACTThe utterance The man fell down because he slipped on a banana peel is a verbal statement in which causation is stated directly, and the major events are not reported in the perceptual order of occurrence. Surprisingly, in retelling 20 'stories', 23 nursery-school children often refused to produce sentences in which causation was stated directly, but readily retold causationimplied utterances; performance was worst for unrelated (control) stories. Moreover, backward temporal order hurt performance only when causation was stated directly. Except for this latter condition, memory was best for the first half of the stories regardless of the temporal arrangement of the clauses. Finally, the majority of the story events were reproduced in the linguistic order in which they had been originally presented.

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