A Comparison of Adult's versus Children's Spontaneous Use of Because and So

Abstract

In this study, we examined spontaneous production of the causal connectives because and so by three age groups: younger children (4 to 6 years old), older children (7 to 9 years old), and adults (over 21 years). Surprisingly, the young children were found to be as correct as adults in their use of the causal connectives. Fifty-six percent of all uses of so at all ages were acausal, and 37% of all uses of because at all ages were errors. Children's most common acausal usage occurred in dysfluency, whereas adults often used causal connectives to encode enabling, but not fully causal, relationships. Inversions of clause order only occurred 19 times in 720 semantically correct causal uses of either connective, and were found at equal frequency at all ages. Adults referred to physical causality relatively more frequently than did children, although all ages referred to psychological causality more than to any other type. There were also age changes in the type of psychological causality articulated.