Causal reasoning and inference making in judging the importance of story statements

The present study investigated the development of the ability to judge the importance of story statements on the basis of their causal properties. Key statements were varied with respect to 2 factors: in terms of the number of their causal relations, and in terms of the kinds of relations they had. Relations were either intraepisodic, that is, connecting statements in the same episode, or interepisodic, that is, connecting statements in different episodes. Children 8, 11, 14, and 18 years of age judged the importance of the statements. Children in all 4 age groups judged statements with many intraepisodic causal relations as more important than statements with few such relations. Only children 11 years and older judged statements as more important when they had interepisodic relations than when they did not. Thus, although young children may be sensitive to quantitative aspects of a statement's relational role within an episode, they may not be as aware of qualitative, that is, structural, differences between kinds of relations. Answers to why questions confirmed these patterns. Older children more often gave answers that crossed episodic boundaries than did the younger children. These findings may reflect age-related differences in children's ability to infer relations between statements and to integrate the information contained in stories. They also attest to the central role that causal inferences play in the interpretation of what is important information in stories.