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:

1. (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.

2. (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: