Children's spontaneous inferences about time and causality in narrative

How do children understand the temporal and causal relations among events in a narrative? We explored the roles of (a) connectives like before and because, (b) clause order, and (c) world knowledge in supporting children's inferences about causal and temporal relations in narrative. We told 3- to 7-year-old children stories containing two events. We then surprised them by asking them to retell the stories, to test what they remembered about the relations between events. Children attended to and recalled the causal and temporal relations from the stories. They were also sensitive to the ordering of the clauses in the stories, and to their plausibility: Children were more likely to modify their retellings when the events in the story were not described chronologically, or if the causal relations described were inconsistent with children’s knowledge of the real world. These tendencies interacted with the specific connectives in the story and their positioning.