A Scalogram Analysis of the Development of the

Use and Comprehension of "Because"

in Children
Roberta Cordgan
University of Denver

, ROBERTA. A Scalogram Armlysis of the Development of the Use arul Comprehension of "Because" in Children. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1975, 46, 195-201. 9 tasks were designed to test the developmental sequence of three types of "because" in 1(X) children aged
37 years. The tasks tested whether comprehension of "because" preceded its usage and at
what point children understood that sentences with reversed clauses were incorrect. Scalogram analyses yielded an index of consistency of .89 and a coeflBcient of homogeneity of .68,
suggesting invariance of sequential order. An ANOVA of age effects was significant,
p < .001, and age was significantly correlated with the number of items passed, r = .82,
p < .01. In the scalogram ordering, comprehension of each type of task preceded usage of
that type. Sentences with reversed clauses were more diflBcult than either comprehension or
usage items. Findings were consistent with those of other investigators who found a change
in language usage corresponding to the change from the preoperational period to the concrete
operational period of intellectual development.

This paper investigates some of the ways

children use and understand the connective
"because." "Because" is used by children in a
number of different ways. For example, Piaget
([1924] 1969) described three ways in which
children use "because." (a) Prelogical relations
are of two types: the first type has clauses
which are randomly juxtaposed and joins two
clauses which do not have an explicit relationship; the second type, a psychological relation,
has two clauses joined by "because" in which
one clause describes an action and one a motivation, (b) Causal relations use "because" to
connect two events where one event is brought
about by the other, (c) Logical relations have
two ideas or judgments connected so that the
clauses describe the logical relation of implication.
Athough Piaget's definitions are of some
use in classifying children's utterances, there
are a number of problems with them. First, the

categories are not mutually exclusive. Piaget

used a subjective judp^ment in determining
whether an utterance was "more" of one type
or another. Second, the categories were arrived
at by Piaget through use of different criteria.
Prelogical relations were discovered by looking
at children's spontaneous utterances and their
errors in a sentence completion task. Causal
and logical relations were discovered mainly
through use of a sentence completion task. Although the different methods were useful in the
initial discovery of the different types of "because," they are not completely suitable for a
controlled experimental design.
The, present research attempts to solve
these problems. A series of tasks was designed
to test children's use and comprehension of
three types of "because." In addition, a subset
of juxtaposition, reversed clauses, was studied
for each of the three types of causal relations.
That is, clauses containing the three types of

The research described here is based on a M.A. thesis submitted to the Department of
Psychology, University of Denver, 1973. I would like to give special thanks to the thesis
committee, Drs. C. Guardo, K. Fischer, and J. Ulehla, for their help on all phases of the
thesis; to the teachers and principals at Walnut Hills Elementary and Preschool, University
Park Manor Preschool, Four Seasons School, and Dry Creek Preschool for their cooperation;
and to my research assistants, Dennis Corash, Dan Swan, and Earl Muir, for their help in the
scoring of the data. Complete lists of stimuli and reprints are available from the author:
Behavior Development Lab, University of Denver, 2040 South York Street, Denver. Colorado
80210.
IChild Development, 1975, 46, 195-201. 1975 by the Society for Res<arch in Child Devetopment, Inc. AH
rights resaved.]

196 Cliild Develc^ment

"because" were reversed by E, and the children
were tested for their comprehension that sentences with reversed clauses were incorrect
Piaget's broad definitions were narrowed
so as to make the categories mutually exclusive.
Causal relations connected only physical
phenomena, as in stones breaking windows or
illness making one stay home. This type of
"because" is labeled physical in the present
study. Psychological relations connected affective states with physical events, as in kicking
because of anger or crying because of being
punched. This type of "because" is labeled affective in the present study. Logical relations
connected related ideas or judgments, as in the
difference between being alive and being dead
or the relationship between all and none. This
type of "because" is labeled concrete logical.
Examples of each of the types of sentences used
in the present study are given in table 1.
Piaget ([1924] 1969) suggested that differential reasoning ability causes the developmental changes in the use of "because." He
contended that before the age of 7 or 8 years,
the child's egocentrism prevents his use of
logical proof. Egocentrism is defined as the
child's lack of awareness of the point of view of
others (Piaget [1946] 1962). Because of his
egocentrism, the child is not concemed with
convincing his listeners of the validity of his
arguments and is thus less deductive than an
adult. According to Piaget ([1924] 1969), the
decline of egocentrism brings about the decline
of juxtaposition and the onset of logical usage
because the child becomes concerned with convincing others of his argument. In his later
works (e.g., Piaget 1968, 1970), the change in
reasoning which occurs around age 7 or 8 cor-

responds to the shift from the preoperational to

the concrete operational period of development.
The d)line of egocentrism is treated as one
example of the onset of concrete operations
(Fiaget & Inhelder 1969). Declining juxtaposition may be related to a factor which Piaget
does not consider, that of temporal ordering.
Katz and Brent (1968) found that first-grade
children gave a sequential rather than a causal
meaning to "because." The children preferred
a temporal link such as "then" to a causal link.
This finding supports Fiaget's view that a prelogical child tends to juxtapose clauses containing "because." Ferriero and Sinclair (1971)
also found juxtaposition in preoperational children. They asked children to describe events
which E had acted out with dolls. Freoperational children juxtaposed their descriptions.
For example, in a situation where a boy doll
went upstairs after he had been washed by a
girl doll, one of the children juxtaposed and reversed his description, saying, "She washed him
and he went upstairs." When the children were
asked to begin their description with the second
event first, they were unable to describe correctly the temporal order until they reached the
concrete operational stage of development.
A psycholinguistic question which arises in
looking at the use and comprehension of "because" is the possibility that developmental
changes in the use of "because" may be due to
differential language rather than differential
cognitive abilities. Concrete logical sentences
may tend to be more difficult syntactically than
physical sentences. To control for this variable,
it is necessary to make concrete logical, physical, and affective items syntactically equivalent.
Such a control is included in the present study

TABLE 1
EXAMPLES OF TEST ITEMS
TYPE OF "BECAUSE"

Affective

Physical

Concrete Logical

Usage

Jon laughed at Sue. Sue

hit Jon because
.

The cat meowed at the girl.

The cat is alive because

Comprehension . . . .

Jane punched Peter. Peter

cried because Jane hurt
him.

The boy threw a stone.

The window broke because
.
Karen was sick. She stayed
home from school because she was sick.

Reversal

Paul pulled Kathy's hair.

Kathy was angry with
Paul because she kicked
him.

FORM OF ITEM

Jon flew a kite. The wind

blew because the kite
flew.

AU the blocks were white.

Jon had a white block because there were only
white ones.
Peter ate all the candy. Peter
ate all the candy because
M. had none.

Boberta Cordgiin 197

as nearly as possible, given the present debate
in linguistics as to whether the syntactic and
semantic components of a grammar can be
separated (Grinder & Elgin 1973). Test sentences were composed of two conjoined "simple" sentences and contained no relative
clauses, passive transformations, negative transformations, etc.
Another psycholinguistic question which is
of interest in this study is the chronological
relationship between the comprehension and
usage of "because." Fiaget dealt only with
usage. Other investigators have found comprehension preceding usage, but they have mainly
studied syntax rather than semantics (Fraser,
Bellugi, & Brown 1963; Lovell & Dixon 1967).
However, Tumer and Rommetveit (1967), investigating both syntactic and semantic factors,
found that comprehension preceded usage in
48 children in kindergarten through third
grade, with sentences of different complexity.
Complexity was determined by both syntactic
and semantic factors. The present research examines the relationship of affective, physical,
and concrete logical "because" in comprehension and usage items as well as items with reversed clauses.
Thus, the purposes of the present study
were (a) to establish empirically the sequence
of usage of three types of "because"; it is predicted that physical usage of "because" precedes cncrete logical usage, since Fiaget found
causal usage preceding logical usage; (b) to
determine whether comprehension of "because"
precedes its usage in keeping with some psycholinguistic research which has found comprehension of some syntactic and semantic forms
preceding usage; (c) to control for syntax so
that differences in usage or comprehension can
be attributed to cognitive rather than syntactic
differences.

Method
Subjects.^The Ss were white, middleclass children, 50 boys and 50 girls, enrolled in
suburban Denver elementary schools and preschools. Ages ranged from 2.5 to 7.5 years, with
20 Ss in each of five age groups. The Ss between 2.5 and 3.4 years composed the 3-yearold group, with corresponding compositions of
the 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old groups.
Design and procedure.^Test items were
deigned which required Ss to demonstrate the
coirect usage and comprehension of the rela-

tions implied by "because." Three usage,

comprehension, and three reversal tasks were
designed, each of which consisted of t h r ^ affective, three physical, and three concrete
logical items. The design of the study and examples of each of the items are given in table 1.
Each item consisted of two sentences accompanied by two (5 X 8-inch) pen and ink
drawings showing the action taking place in
the sentences. Some of the pictures were
adapted from Kessel (1970), and others were
drawn freehand by the investigator. Six items
were adapted from Fiaget ([1924] 1969), and
five were based on 8 hours of behavioral observation of the spontaneous usage of "because"
in 36 children aged 4-11 years. Observations
were made at a local playground by E, who recorded verbatim every utterance of "because"
by the children. The remaining items were
created by E using vocabulary taken from a list
of words used by children before entering
school. All vocabulary in the first 11 items was
checked against this list (Buckingham & Dolch
1936).
Each usage item consisted of two sentences. The first was a simple sentence. The
second was a simple sentence followed by "because" with the child required to fill in the
second sentence. The children were told that E
would tell them a part of a story and that they
should make up an ending. They were given
three simple practice items in which E read
the first sentence and showed them the first
picture, then read the first half of the second
sentence and showed them the second picture.
If the child did not complete the practice item,
he was prompted with "can you tell me the
rest?" or "can you finish the story?" All the
children, knew the procedure by the end of the
third practice item. The practice items were
not included in any later data analyses.
Each comprehension and reversal item
consisted of two sentences. The fii^t was a
simple sentence. The second was comprised of
two simple sentences joined by "because." (See
table 1 for examples of all items.) The child
was not required to use "because" in these
items; he merely had to tell whether the sentence was true or false. Comprehension items
were meaningful in the form in which they
were presented. Reversal items contained two
clauses in which the aflfective, physical, or concrete logical relationship between them was
revereed. The children were instructed tiiat
they would be told a story and that they were

19S CMd Development

to tell E whether it was "yes or no, right or
wrong." They were given three practice items
with prompting. All the children knew the
procedure by the end of the third practice item.
Each of the child's answers was followed by
questions to reelicit the response in order to
make sure that the child had understood his
answer and was not merely giving random yesno responses but could answer the questions in
several different forms. To be scored as correct,
the child had to answer correctly the main yesno question and at least one of the follow-up
questions. If he was wrong on the main yes-no
question but was correct on all follow-up questions, he was also scored as correct. For example, the child had to tell whether the following comprehension item was right or wrong:
"All the blocks were white. Jon had a white
block because there were only white ones." The
follow-up questions were: "Could Jon have a
yellow block? Did Jon have a white block because there were only white ones? What made
Jon have a white block?"
A reversal-usage task was also included
as a control for the possibility that in the usage
items the child was merely taking the first
sentence and sticking it in the blank after the
second sentence without understanding the
relationship. In the other reversal tasks, the
questions were of the same form as the comprehension questions (see table 1). In the reversalusage task, the items had the form of the other
usage tasks, but the first sentence in the item
was unrelated to the sentence following it, for
example: "Karen's toy broke. It is raining outside because
." If the child took the first
sentence and put it at the end of the second,
the resulting sentence made no sense; that is,
"It is raining outside because Karen's toy
broke."
The presentation of the 30 items (three
items in each of nine conditions plus three control items) was counterbalanced so that 50% of
the children received all usage items first and
50% received the comprehension and reversal
items together before the usage items. Within
the usage or comprehension and reversal tasks,
one-third of the children received an affective,
one-third a physical, and one-third a concrete
logical item first. The criterion for all tasks was
a pass on two out of three items.
Sconng of data.The E and one of three
undergraduate research assistants scored each
item independently from a cassette tape recording and written transcription of the child's re-

sponses. The age of the child being scored was

not known by the assistants, although they did
know the rationale and d e s i ^ of the study.
Green's index of consistency (1956) and
Loevinger's indices of homogeneity (1947)
were computed following Kofsky (1966) and
Wohlwill (1960) to test for invariance of sequential order of difiBculty. Loevinger's three
scores of homogeneity were (fl) overall test
homogeneity, which shows how far from perfect homogeneity the test is; (b) item homogeneity, which calculates how homogeneous
each item is with the rest of the test; and (c)
interitem homogeneity, which calculates how
homogeneous each item is with every adjacent
item. Green's index of consistency calculates an
index of reproducibility comparable to Guttman's.
Results
Each S was given a score based on the
number of tasks he had passed. The means and
standard deviations for each age group are presented in table 2.
Only nine out of 100 children failed the
reversal-usage task, indicating that the children
were not merely taking the first sentence and
placing it in the blank after the second sentence. Instead, they either ignored the first sentence in making up an answer, stated that they
didn't know, stated that the item made no
sense, or attempted to tie the sentences together in some reasonable manner. The children who failed the task were distributed fairly
evenly across age groups, vdth two 3-yearolds, zero 4-year-olds, three 5-year-olds, one
6-year-old, and three 7-year-olds failing the
task.
An analysis of variance of the effects of age
on total number of items correct was significant,
F(4,95) = 54.54, p < .001. A correlation of
age with score was also significant, r = .82,
p < .01. A Tukey post hoc significance test inTABLE 2
"BECAUSE" SCORES AS A FUNCTION OF AGE

Age Group
(Years)
4
6

Mean

SD

20
20
20
20
20

8.15
13.30
16.10
19.70
21.35

3.31
2.51
3.21
3.47
3.06

Roberta CcHrrigan
TABLE 3
PERCENTAGE OF SS IN EACH AGE GROUP PASSING EACH TASK
AGE GROUP
TASK

AC .
PC .
AU .
CLC
PU .
AR .
CLU
PR .
CLR

90%
80
45
45
20

100%

100%

5
5

100
90
70
65
0
10

0
0

90

95
75
90
20
30
10
0

dicated that all age groups were significantly

different from each other except the 6- and 7year-olds. The order was as follows: 3 < 4 < 5
< (6=7).
Table 3 summarizes the percentage of Ss
passing each task. Tasks are ranked in order of
difficulty by the percentage passing each task.
The information in table 3 is used in the scalogram analyses which follow.
The following order of tasks was observed:
affective comprehension (AC) < physical comprehension (PC) < affective usage (AU) <
(concrete logical comprehension [CLC] =
physical usage [FU]) < affective reversal
(AR) < concrete logical usage (CLU) < physical reversal (FR) < concrete logical reversal
(CLR). Within the affective or physical or concrete logical tasks, C < U < R. Within the
comprehension or usage or reversal tasks,
A < F < CL. In addition, AU < CLC and
AR < CLU; that is, the A of the following
C < U < R preceded the CL of the preceding
C < U < R.
Item-test homogeneity, H^^ (Loevinger
1947), was computed for each task. This measures the degree to which Ss passing each task
had a higher total score on the test than those
failing a task. Results are summarized in table
4. The results suggest that the tasks discriminate stages in the development of '%ecause," since H^'s vary from 0.76 to 1.00. H's
theoretically vary from zero for tasks perfectly
heterogeneous with the total test to 1.00 for
tests perfectly homogeneous with the total test.
Interitem homogeneity, H (Loevinger 1947),
was calculated to determine how much passing
a difficult task implied passing an easier one as
compared to chance. Results are listed in table 5.
Loevinger's coeflBcient of homogeneity was also
calculated, Hf = .68. This indicated the num-

TOTAL

100%

100%-

100
100
95
100
50
40
45
35

100
100
90
100

98%
94
86

75
55
60
50

75
75
52
40
24
18

ber of times Ss passed easier but failed harder

items for the entire response matrix.
Chance reproducibility was calculated
(Green 1956) to be .575. Observed reproducibility was .954. The index of consistency was
thus .89. Green considers any index over .5(X)
to indicate a scalable set of items. A perfect
sequence of passes and failures was shown by
60% of the Ss. Of the remaining 40%, 28%
had only one imperfection in tibe sequence,
11% had two imperfections, and only 1% had
more than two imperfections in the sequence.
Discussion
The empirical sequence of "because"
which was established is more complex than the
prediction made at the outset of the study. The
sequence A < F < CL holds with both comprehension and reversal tasks. Affective items
may be easier than the other items because of
the young child's egocentrism. Affective motives
are closer to his universe than physical
phenomena. Concrete logical items are passed
most frequently by 6-7-year-old children, the
oldest in the sample. This is the age of onset of
concrete operations. Thus, attainment of conTABLE 4
OF ITEMS WITH TOTAL TEST SCORE

Item
AC

PC
AU
CLC
PU
AR
CLU
PR
CLR

1.00
0.76
0.92
0.80
0.9S
0.91
0.77
0.93
0.93

200 Child Developm^t

TABLE 5
HOMOGENEITIES

AC
PC
AU
CLC
PU
AR
CLU
PR

PC

AU

CLC

PU

AR

CLU

PR

CLR

1.000

1.000
0.225

0.334
0.334
0.334

l.CXX)
0.778
0.810
0.360

1.000
0.463
LOOO
0.742
1.000

1.000
1.000
1(XX)
0.572
1.000
0.431

1.000
0.307
1.000
1.000
1.000
0.820
0.422

1.000
1.000
1.000
0.927
1.000
0.839
0.715
0.927

...

Crete operations may be a prerequisite for the

usage of concrete logical "because."
The hypothesis that comprehension of "because" precedes its usage was confirmed. However, all comprehension did not precede all
usage; rather, comprehension of each type preceded usage of that type: AC < AU, PC < FU,
CLC < CLU. This finding is consistent with
some psycholinguistic findings that comprehension of grammatical form precedes usage of that
form.
The coeflBcients resulting from scalogram
indices used in this study were high enough and
far enough from chance to suggest invariance of
sequential order and thus support the Fiagetian
stage notion of development.
Total frequency of correct responses was
significantly different between ages. An inspection of the nature of the children's errors indicated that there was also some consistency in
the types of errors made by children of different
ages. The data are insufficient to compute statistical tests, but the findings are nonetheless of
interest. The 3-year-olds gave many irrelevant,
no response, or "I don't know" answers, with
55% of their responses to CLU items being of
this type. Three-year-olds also gave "just because" answers to CLU items. When asked "because why" the children often looked surprised
and answered "just because, that's all." None of
the other age groups gave any "just because" answers. The number of psychological or causal
answers given to CLU items increased with aeje,
with 25% of the 3-year-olds and 53% of the
7-year-olds giving these types of answers.
There were also consistent age trends in
the types of errors made on reversal items.
Older children seemed to be somewhat confused about the reversal of causality and knew
that sometfiing was wrong even when they did
not know what it was. More than half of the

7-year-olds' incorrect reversal responses were

ones in which S answered one of the follow-up
questions correctly although he answered the
test item and other follow-up questions incorrectly. For example, Q: "F. pulled K.'s hair.
K. was angry with F. because she kicked him."
A: "Yes." Q: "What made K. angry?" A: "F.
pulled her hair." Q: "Was K. angry because she
kicked F.?" A: "Yes." The 7-year-olds who made
this type of error were probably in the transitional stage between preoperations and concrete
operations. In contrast, 100% of the 3-year-olds
who failed a reversal item were incorrect on the
test item and all follow-up items.
Ferriero and Sinclair (1971) found that
preoperational children could not describe the
correct temporal order of two events when
asked to begin their description with the second
event. Causality may be a subset of temporal
order relations for these children. The present
research indicates that not only can projperational children not describe the correct order,
they also cannot comprehend it. Since the cause
of an event always precedes its effect, children
may understand clauses joined by "because" as
meaning A happens, then B happens. This supports Katz and Brent's (1968) finding that
children preferred temporal Unks rather than
causal links. When a sentence reads A because
B, children may understand it as A then B.
Since the second meaning preserves the temporal order of the first sentence, children will
understand the meaning of the first sentence.
However, when the causality is reversed to read
B because A, the children still understand this
to mean B then A. Since the meaning is not
preserved across sentences, the children get the
sentence wrong and cannot understand why the
sentence is incorrect.
The findings in this study are consistent
with those of otlier investigators who found a
change in language usage corresponding to the

Roberta Conigan
change from the preoperational to the concrete
operational period. This study suggests that the
ability to understand the problem with reversed
clauses and the ability to use concrete logical
"because" mark the concrete operational stage.
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