Developing Comprehension vs. Production of 'Because' and 'So.'

A series of studies evaluated methodological issues in the investigation of children's developing comprehension and production of the words "because" and "so." The familiarity of task materials and their relevance to 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old children's experience were the focus of the first study. For the second study, involving the subjects of the first experiment, a totally verbal corollary of Kun's (1968) methodology for measuring children's understanding of causality was employed. Children were told a short story about causally related events in which a cause-and-effect relationship was embedded in the context of four events. An additional focus was the comparison of psychological and physical causality. The third experiment explored the possibility that problems in 4- and 5-year-old children's performance were due to noncomprehension of the experimenter's "language game." Subjects were provided with prolonged practice and feedback in the production of "because" sentences. In an extensive fourth study, 4- through 9-year-old children's production of sentences using "because" or "so" was assessed. Subjects produced such sentences in the context of narrating events they had experienced. On the basis of the series of studies, it was concluded that tasks dramatically determined the picture of children's competence produced by researchers. (RH)