Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children understand the temporal and causalrelations among events in a narrative? We explored theroles of (a) connectives like before and because, (b)chronology, and (c) world knowledge in supportingchildren's inferences about causal and temporal relations innarrative. We told 3- to 7-year-old children storiescontaining two events. We then unexpectedly asked them toretell the stories from memory, to test what they hadencoded. Children attended to and recalled the causal andtemporal relations from the stories. They were more likelyto modify their retellings when the events in the story werenot described chronologically, or when the causal relationswere inconsistent with children’s knowledge of the realworld. These tendencies interacted with the specificconnectives in the story and their positioning. Thesefindings indicate that children as young as 3 spontaneouslyintegrate their knowledge of connectives, sentencestructure, and the world when processing narratives.