A naturalistic study of the production of causal connectives by children

Abstract

This study analysed the naturalistic productions of because and so by 96 children, vaged 3; 6–9; 6, vwhile vnarrating real, vpersonal events. Few semantic errors could be construed as evidence of confused thinking; none is a confusion vdescribed by Piaget. Of the vsemantically correct causal uses, 81 % encode psychological causality, mostly statements of other people's intentions. Other analyses revealed: (1) many of the relationships encoded are highly predictable, (2) virtually all causality occurred prior to the time of narration, (3) age trends are remarkably absent, (4) because and so are used in significantly different ways even by the youngest children, (5) only eight sentences showed a vreversal of the appropriate order of cause and effect. The discrepancy between the last finding and many other laboratory studies vwhich find many such reversals may be due to the fact that children are causally linking strictly successive events only 32 % of the time; for the rest, they are encoding events that partially or completely overlap in time.

Age- and ability-related differences in young readers' use of conjunctions

“…Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter & Fiess, 1980). because and so, is evident by 5;0 (McCabe & Peterson, 1985). Nineyear-olds are as likely as three-year-olds to use and in this flexible way (Peterson & McCabe, 1987).…”

Explanations in naturally occurring peer talk: Conversational emergence and function, thematic scope, and contribution to the development of discursive skills

“…Considering causal links as a cognitive developmental issue (Piaget, 1929(Piaget, /1972, research in this tradition has been primarily experimental and concerned with the links between types of explanations and mental representations (Donaldson, 1986;Gelman & Gottfried, 1996;Schult & Wellman, 1997). Psycholinguistic studies of the development of causal connectives in child discourse have added a linguistic perspective, focusing attention on linguistic markers and the types of cohesive text relations they represent (Hood & Bloom, 1979;McCabbe & Peterson, 1985).…”

Children's narratives of sexual abuse

“…When narrating about everyday events, children are concerned about telling the listener the meaning of their experiences and are able to do so (Peterson & McCabe, 1983). They make use of psychological causality to explain why something happened (McCabe & Peterson, 1985), and their story structure is most commonly in accordance with a classic pattern where the story is organized around a central point, followed by an evaluation and a resolution (Peterson & McCabe, 1983). The representation of events in a narrative often includes information on who, when, and where the events occurred, what the result was, and on how the person and/or others who were there reacted (Trabasso & Stein, 1997).…”