Children's reproductions: effects of event order and implied vs. directly stated causation

Abstract

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.

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.…”

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

“…The results of this study can be compared with those of other studies concerned with the general topic of children's ability to handle reversals, such as in sentences containing implied or stated causation (Homzie & Gravitt 1977), sentences containing the temporal terms "before" and "after" (Clark 1971), and active versus passive sentences (Bebout 1977) .3 For example, our results are consistent with those studies such as Fraser, Bellugi, and Brown (1963), which have shown that the active sentence pattern is acquired before the passive sentence pattern. Semantic cues, such as occur in pragmatically nonreversible sentences, can reduce or destroy this effect (Bever 1970;Slobin 1966;Strohner & Nelson 1974).…”

Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions: an analysis of two dense corpora

“…Specifically, they found that children 3;6 and under only produced Speech-Act sentences. Furthermore, while children 3;7 and above did produce sentences in all three categories, more than half were Speech-Act sentences and only between about 15-24 % expressed Content causality, which is the type that is typically tested in comprehension studies (Emerson, 1979;Lucia A French, 1988;Homzie & Gravitt, 1977;Johnston & Welsh, 2000;Kuhn & Phelps, 1976). Although did not report detailed patterns in the mothers' speech, they did comment that "a preliminary analysis of the adults' uses of causals in this corpus revealed that a vast majority were also Speech Act-Level causals" (p. 210).…”