When-questions: a study of how children linguistically encode temporal information

Sixty children between the ages of 4 and 7 years and 10 adults were presented with a series of stories illustrated by five pictures in a comic strip format. Each story was followed by either a "when-," "why-," or control question. With respect to the "when"-questions, some of the stories involved causally related events while others did not. An analysis of the responses supported the hypotheses that causal relationships play an important role in the development of the ability to encode temporal relationships in response to "when"-questions.