How children talk about what happened

Abstract

This study investigates the development of past tense expressions in the speech of children from 1; 6 to 2; 6. It is shown that this development depends crucially on the child's cognitive construction of the time dimension, as described by Piaget (1954, 1971). In this process two different cognitive routes are followed, depending on the type of event the child has to encode. Past events resulting in the end state of some object are gradually grasped and encoded by means of a practical process–effect coordination. Past states and activities, on the contrary, i.e. past events that do not result in an end state, are referred to through a more primitive distinction between a pretend vs. a real world. This difference is formally reflected in the differential past-tense marking appearing on verbs which describe the two different types of event.