Children's judgment and recall of causal connectives: A developmental study of “because,” “so,” and “and”

Abstract

The present study examined the acceptability judgments and recall performance of children aged 6,9, and 11 years with sentences expressing psychological cause-effect relations. Thirty-two sentences containing “because” medially, “because” initially, “so,” and “and” were generated from four clause pairs. Both probable and improbable event orders were used. The results indicated that children preferred “because” to “so” or “and” for statements of psychological causality. However, on both tasks, first and third graders frequently failed to attend to the temporal ordering specified by each sentence construction. The younger children also tended to judge all sentences acceptable, suggesting that they were concerned only with the probable association of event pairs, and not with the usual order of the events. Order of mention strategies did not occur in any group, suggesting that they arise only when children cannot make interpretations based on probable order of events. The data also indicated that the recall task is an unreliable index of rules for comprehension and production.