Children's Comprehension of Causal Constructions with "Because''and "So"

A naturalistic study of the production of causal connectives by children

“…They demonstrated very few of the syntactic order reversals so commonly found in the laboratory comprehension studies reviewed above. The rarity of such reversal errors and the absence of any age trend support Hood & Bloom's (1979) findings for the spontaneous productions of causal connectives by children under the age of 356, and also Katz & Brent's (1968) findings for the spontaneous productions of causal connectives by children in grades 1 and 6, and qualify the many laboratory studies of comprehension of such connectives by children in the age range we studied (Bebout et al 1980, Corrigan 1975, Emerson 1978, Homzie & Gravitt 1976, Johnson & Chapman 1980, Katz & Brent 1968, Kuhn & Phelps 1976, Piaget 1928/1972). What we have here is yet another instance of the perennial confound in studies of language ability: is this discrepancy between studies due to the fact that children produce causal connectives before they comprehend the productions of others, or is it due to the fact that laboratory studies consistently underestimate the linguistic ability of children ?…”

“…In other words, children seem to interpret because as meaning and or then. A number of other researchers also find such problems in comprehension from children under the age of 7 or 8, or even older (Bebout, Segalowitz & White 1980, Corrigan 1975, Emerson 1978, Homzie & Gravitt 1976, Johnson & Chapman 1980, Katz & Brent 1968, Kuhn & Phelps 1976. If children are as confused in their causal language and thought as these studies suggest, one wonders how they play with complicated toys, how they make things, how they negotiate their world at all.…”

Causal sentence production in children with language impairments

“…In contrast to the findings from observational studies of production, most early experimental studies of causal sentence comprehension revealed poor performance in much older children (e.g. Emerson 1979, Bebout et al 1980. When children were presented with sentences containing causal connectives, it was typically not until about 7 or 8 years of age that they acted them out correctly or matched them appropriately to picture sequences.…”

Factors that influence comprehension of connectives among language minority children from Spanish-speaking backgrounds

“…In this study, we included a fifth class: the contrastive relationship (or additive-negative , per Knott & Sanders, 1998; Sanders et al, 1992). Existing research suggests that not all connectives are equally easy to process; with few exceptions (notably, Cain et al, 2005; McClure & Steffensen, 1985), there is substantial convergent evidence that the order of class from easiest to most difficult is as follows: additive, contrastive, temporal, causal, and adversative (Badzinski, 1988; Bebout, Segalowitz, & White, 1980; Bloom, Lahey, Hood, Lifter, & Fliess, 1980; Cain et al, 2005; Geva, 2006a; Goldman & Murray, 1992; Graesser & Haberlandt, 1993; Nippold et al, 1992; Ozono & Ito, 2003; Pretorious, 2006; Shapiro & Hudson, 1991). An explanation of each class is presented in Table 1.…”