Children's causal attributions to states and events described by different classes of verbs

Corrigan, Roberta; Stevenson, Colleen M.

doi:10.1016/0885-2014(94)90005-1

Cited by 16 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Each sentence was followed by 1983b) and Italian (Franco & Arcuri, 1990). These results support findings of an effect of causality in adults (Rudolph & Försterling, 1997a), but also show it in children, which has been demonstrated in fewer studies (e.g., Au, 1986, with 5-year-old children; Corrigan & Stevenson, 1994, with 3-and 4-year-old children). Furthermore, the broad range within which the responses fell (from 3.9% to 100%) shows that implicit causality has a continuous, rather than a dichotomous, nature, a conclusion that has already been highlighted in the literature (Caramazza et al, 1977;Garvey et al, 1974Garvey et al, -1975Rudolph & Först-erling, 1997b).…”

Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 78%

“…The implicit causality of the interpersonal verbs is a robust effect that has been demonstrated in different age groups-in adults (Rudolph & Försterling, 1997a) as well as in children (e.g., Au, 1986;Corrigan & Stevenson, 1994;see Borzone & Silva, 2007, for a study of anaphor resolution in Spanish-speaking children). Different methods have been used, ranging from more intrusive and artificial ones that force a choice to less intrusive and more natural ones involving free choice.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Different methods have been used, ranging from more intrusive and artificial ones that force a choice to less intrusive and more natural ones involving free choice. Different variables unrelated to the verb (e.g., sentence structure: active or passive) have been manipulated, even in sentences that describe interactions between inanimate entities (e.g., Au, 1986;Corrigan, 2001;Corrigan & Stevenson, 1994;Frazier, Clifton, & Randall, 1983;Garnham et al, 1992;Garvey & Caramazza, 1974;Garvey et al, 1974Garvey et al, -1975Grober et al, 1978;Rudolph, 1997;Rudolph & Först-erling, 1997a). One of the variables of interest that has been manipulated is gender (Lafrance, Brownell, & Hahn, 1997;Mannetti & De Grada, 1991).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish

Goikoetxea

Pascual

Acha

2008

Behavior Research Methods

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Section: Methodssupporting

confidence: 78%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish

Goikoetxea

Pascual

Acha

2008

Behavior Research Methods

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“…Attribution research documents that causal attribution biases are exhibited at an early age. For instance, research studies show that children-even as young as preschoolers and kindergarteners-make causal attributions for their own success and failure, and the success and failure of other children (e.g., see Guerin, 1999;Fincham & Beach, 1998;Van Duuren & Scaife, 1996;Bell & McCallum, 1995;Corrigan & Stevenson, 1994;Earn & Sobol, 1990).…”

Section: Past Division Performance and Managers' Causal Attributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opportunism in Capital Budget Recommendations: The Effects of Past Performance and Its Attributions*

Vera‐Muñoz

2001

Decision Sciences

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This study uses an experiment to examine the separate and combined effects of managers' loss aversion and their causal attributions about their divisions' performance on tendencies to make goal-incongruent capital budget recommendations. We find that managers' recommendations are biased by their loss aversion. In particular, managers of high-performing divisions are more likely than managers of low-performing divisions to propose investments that maximize their division's short-term profits at the expense of the firm's long-term value. We also find that managers' recommendations are biased by their causal attributions. In particular, managers are more likely to propose investments that maximize their division's short-term profits at the expense of the firm's long-term value when they attribute their division's performance to external causes (e.g., task difficulty or luck) rather than to internal causes (e.g., managerial ability or effort). Further, the effects of causal attributions are greater for managers of high-performing divisions than for managers of low-performing divisions. The study's findings are important because loss aversion and causal attributions are often manifested in firms. Thus, they may bias managers' decisions, which in turn may be detrimental to the firms' long-term value.

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“…For example, 2-year-olds better comprehend sentences with animate than inanimate subjects, suggesting some sensitivity to the tendency for subject noun phrases to be animate (Childers & Echols, 2004; Corrigan, 1988; Lempert, 1989). Two-year-olds also use knowledge of the animacy of likely argument role-fillers for a particular verb in sentence comprehension: for example, they inferred that an unfamiliar noun must refer to an animal if it was the object of feed (“Mommy’s feeding the ferret!”; Goodman, McDonough, & Brown, 1998; see also Corrigan & Stevenson, 1994; Fernald, 2007). Children’s ability to track the distributions of particular lexical items relative to one another is also well documented.…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

Two-year-olds use distributional cues to interpret transitivity-alternating verbs

Scott

Fisher

2009

Language and Cognitive Processes

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Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic roles they assign to the subjects of intransitive sentences (undergoer and agent, respectively). To distinguish verbs presented in these two alternations, children must detect this difference in role assignments. We examined distributional features of the input as one possible source of information about this role difference. Experiment 1 showed that in a corpus of child-directed speech, causal and unspecified-object verbs differed in their patterns of intransitive-subject animacy and lexical overlap between nouns in subject and object positions. Experiment 2 tested children’s ability to use these two distributional cues to infer the meaning of a novel causal or unspecified-object verb, by separating the presentation of a novel verb’s distributional properties from its potential event referents. Children acquired useful combinatorial information about the novel verb simply by listening to its use in sentences, and later retrieved this information to map the verb to an appropriate event.

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Children's causal attributions to states and events described by different classes of verbs

Cited by 16 publications

References 33 publications

Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish

Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish

Opportunism in Capital Budget Recommendations: The Effects of Past Performance and Its Attributions*

Two-year-olds use distributional cues to interpret transitivity-alternating verbs

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