Causality in Children’s Oral and Written Narrative Retelling

One of the main prerequisites for understanding and producing coherent oral discourse or written text is successful understanding and production of causal relations. During both production, children have at their disposal a wide range of linguistic modes to mark it, some of which are more explicit and others more implicit. In this study, retelling was used as a method to elicit narratives that served as a tool for analysing causal relations. Retelling enables exploring the linguistic reformulation of the syntactic structures of a previously stored story and the analysis of the overlap between the language content which child is exposed to (language input) and the language that child produces (language output). Two groups of children, aged 10 (N = 23) and 12 (N = 30), were exposed to the story at two time points; in the first they had to retell it orally and in the second they had to write it. The conducted analyses showed that 12-years old children produced in total more causal relations than 10-year-old in written modality only. This difference is explained by the greater writing competence of 12-year-old children in the production of more complex syntactic structures. Furthermore, both groups of children in both modalities dominantly used the same causal markers that are primarily grammatical. All these findings point to the children’s ability to reformulate causal relations regardless of the language content to which they were previously exposed.