Tracing Developmental Trajectories of Causal Language in Early Childhood

We examined causal language development, its role in caregiver–child interactions (8–36 months) using the Koç-University-Longitudinal-Language-Development-Corpus. Both in child-directed and child-speech, giving information–explaining was the most frequent function of causal language. Growth-curve-model showed that causal language in child-directed-speech increased over time and shaped by caregiver’s utterance-density and diversity of causal types.