engleski

Expressing causality in children's retelling

One of the crucial prerequisites for understanding and producing oral or written text is successful understanding and production of causal relations (cf. Trabasso 1994). These relations can be expressed by means of language-specific or non-specific causal markers, such as certain aspectual marks and constructions, prepositional phrases or even certain lexicon choices (cf. Duque 2014). We hypothesize that the complexity in understanding and producing causal relations could be related to the use of those non-specific markers. The aim of this research follows our previous research on complex linguistic phenomena that are analysed in line with the theory of reformulation (Martinot 1994, Martinot et al. 2019). In this study, by describing the causal relationship between two predications, we want to identify how implicit and explicit causal relations from the given source text (story Tom and Julie, Cr. Tom i Julija) are reformulated (restituted) by young speakers. Twelve causal relations were confirmed in the source text, classified into five types of causality markers (T) depending on their degree of explicitness (cf. Pit 2003). Oral and written causal relations produced by the same Croatian children starting from the unique source text are analyzed in order to find out 1) if there is a difference within and between 10- (N=23) and 12-year-old (N=30) children in two linguistic modalities regarding these phenomena and 2) whether there is any difference between the two groups of children and two modalities in using a specific type of causal markers. Our hypotheses are: H1. There is a difference in reformulating causal relations in oral and written children’s production. 12-year-olds will produce more causal relations in both modalities than 10-year-olds. H2. The explicit causal marker will be the most dominant marking type in the older group in both modalities. 10-year-olds will produce more other, less explicit causal markers. The results show that there is no significant difference in the number of produced causal relations in oral vs written retelling among 10-year-olds (t=1, 551, df= 44, p>, 05) nor among 12-year-olds (t=-, 471, df= 58, p>, 05). Looking at the oral retelling, the results show that there is no significant difference between 10- and 12-year-old children (t=-0, 82, df= 51, p>, 05). A significant difference between the two age groups is found in the number of produced causal relations in written retelling (t=-2, 123, df= 51, p<, 05), in favor of the older group. 10-year olds in both modalities produce the most often T3 (grammatical, more precisely, a syntactical marker that is not normally dedicated to causality). It is also the most dominant marking type in the older group in both modalities. T3 covers a wide range of means for expressing causal relations – from simple conjunctions to complex constructions – they are the most numerous among other markers from our typology. More detailed subcategorization is needed to be able to conclude on their role.

late language acquisition, causal expressions, retelling, Croatian

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