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Introduction
A puzzling discrepancy
The results of the elicited production studies, together with those of Hood's and McCabe and Peterson's studies, indicate that children understand the directional element of the causal connectives' meaning well before the age of 5. On the other hand, the results of most of the comprehension experiments reported in the literature seem to suggest that the directional element is not understood until the age of about 7 or 8. This discrepancy calls for an explanation. The experiment which will be reported in this chapter was designed to test one hypothesis about what the explanation might be.
Most of the previous comprehension experiments have been based on the assumption that answering the question:
‘At what age do children understand the directional element of because and so?’
is equivalent to answering the question:
‘At what age do children know that because is followed by a reference to the event which happened first, whereas so is followed by a reference to the event which happened next?’
In this chapter, I shall challenge the assumption that these two questions are equivalent, and I shall put forward the hypothesis that the child's understanding of the directional element is initially based on causal direction rather than temporal order.
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