Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In everyday conversation, speakers often give partial explanations, and listeners must draw inferences to fill the gaps in their understanding. When speakers emphasize an unseen cause in their explanation, given knowledge of causal structure, adults can infer if the cause was abnormal or normal. However, the development of this inferential skill is unknown. Across three experiments, we tested adults (N = 62) and 5-8-year-olds (N = 107) on a novel paradigm that assessed normality inferences and explanatory selection. In addition to replicating prior work with adults, we find that 7-8-year-olds also infer the abnormal event, tracking causal influence and pragmatic informativeness. Whereas 5-6-year-olds do not yet make this adult-like inference, they do prefer an explanation citing the abnormal cause over an explanation citing the normal one. These results imply that sensitivity to normality in causal explanations emerges as early as age 5, possibly developing in tandem with skills in counterfactual reasoning.