| dc.description.abstract | There are few studies that explore the way of children expressing the causal relationships in stories (mainly how they use causal connectives) and the development of causal categories. The first part of this study examined how the 5-year-old children using causal connectives to express the causal relationships in stories. Four kinds of expression were proposed: (1) correctly using causal connectives; (2) using alternatives; (3) omitting connectives; (4) inappropriate expression.
The second part of this study used CHILDES database which included the corpus of three-, five- and seven-year-old children who all told the “Frog, where are you?” story. A causal network of discourse analysis was adopted. It was proposed by Trabasso, van den Broek and Suh (1989), including coding story components coding, causal relationship judgement and three causal categories (motivational, psychological, physical) analysis.
Two-way ANOVA was conducted to investigate the relationship among age, causal connectives and causal categories. The major findings were as following:
1.Children often expressed causal relationship by using alternative connectives or omitting connectives. They seldom used causal connectives to express causal relationships.
2.In terms of total frequency of four ways to express causal relationship, seven-year-old’s frequency had more than five-year-old’s and five-year-old children’s frequency had more than three-year-old’s.
3.Concerning three causal categories, three-year-old children told the physical causal relationship more often than the other two categories. Five- and seven-year-old children showed more expression of motivational causal relationship.
4.Three- and five-year-old children expressed three causal categories by using alternative connectives, then by omitting connectives. Seven-year-old children often omitted connectives to express motivational and physical causal relationships, or they used alternative connectives. This result shows that children do not express causal relationship differently because of different causal categories.
Finally, this study discussed the results in terms of future research recommendations and practical perspectives with the restriction of research design. | en_US |