Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The development of the causal connectives and of causality: some previous studies
- 3 Elicited production studies
- 4 The empirical mode
- 5 The intentional mode
- 6 The deductive mode
- 7 General discussion
- Appendices
- 1 Details of procedures for elicited production experiments
- 2 Sequences and items for Experiment 4
- 3 Stories and items used in Experiment 5
- 4 Materials used in Experiment 6 (Deductive/Empirical)
- 5 Acceptability judgement questionnaire based on Experiment 6
- 6 Materials used in Experiment 7 (Deductive Marking)
- Notes
- References
- Index
2 - The development of the causal connectives and of causality: some previous studies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The development of the causal connectives and of causality: some previous studies
- 3 Elicited production studies
- 4 The empirical mode
- 5 The intentional mode
- 6 The deductive mode
- 7 General discussion
- Appendices
- 1 Details of procedures for elicited production experiments
- 2 Sequences and items for Experiment 4
- 3 Stories and items used in Experiment 5
- 4 Materials used in Experiment 6 (Deductive/Empirical)
- 5 Acceptability judgement questionnaire based on Experiment 6
- 6 Materials used in Experiment 7 (Deductive Marking)
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
Children's comprehension and production of causal connectives
Piaget's theory and research
Piaget's work yields two main hypotheses regarding children's comprehension and production of the causal connectives:
(a) Children younger than about 7 or 8 years will tend to invert the cause–effect relation when they are producing and comprehending causal sentences.
(b) Children younger than about 7 or 8 years will fail to differentiate among physical, psychological and logical relations, and will tend to over-generalise the psychological relations. They will understand psychological relations first, then physical relations, and finally logical relations.
Piaget's own research provides some support for these hypotheses.
Piaget (1926) reports an experiment in which 6- to 8-year-olds were told a story or given an explanation of a mechanical object by the experimenter, and were then asked to reproduce the story or explanation to another child of the same age. Although Piaget does not give any detailed numerical results, he states that the children rarely expressed causal relations explicitly, but rather tended to juxtapose statements. Moreover, Piaget claims that even when the children did link two statements with (the French equivalent of) because, they did not intend to express a directional causal relation:
because does not yet denote an unambiguous relation of cause and effect, but something much vaguer and more undifferentiated, which may be called the ‘relation of juxtaposition’, and which can best be rendered by the word and… When the child replaces and by because, he means to denote, sometimes the relation of cause and effect, sometimes the relation of effect and cause.
(p. 116)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Children's ExplanationsA Psycholinguistic Study, pp. 17 - 42Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986