Preregistration Documents for "Causal language in child-directed speech in Singapore"

Causal reasoning is an important cognitive competency that allows us to make predictions, categorise items, make decisions, problem-solve and more (Waldmann & Hagmayer, 2013). A causal event structure involves a cause: a prior event that occurs, and an effect: a result that occurs because of the prior event. When describing this cause-effect relationship, people use causal language to describe the events. Causal language could include phrases like “as a result”, or sentence structures like “because… so…”. Human depth of causal understanding seems to develop from a young age. Infants start using and learning causal language from 12-24 months (Gopnik, 1982). Research shows that structural cues of causal language facilitates casual understanding in young children, and parental use of causal language can predict children’s causal verb comprehension (Aktan-Erciyes & Göksun, 2021; Ger et al., 2021). Given the importance of causal reasoning and the influence of causal language on understanding on causality, this study aims to investigate the developmental trajectory of causal language used by parents with their children in the Singaporean context.