SCRIPTS OR SCRAPS - RECONSIDERING THE DEVELOPMENT OF SEQUENTIAL UNDERSTANDING

A growing literature attests to temporally ordered recall of events by children under 2 years of age. Other data suggest a developmental sequence wherein the ability to reproduce unfamiliar and/or arbitrarily ordered events, and familiar events in other than canonical order develops well after the first ordered productions of events. Early ordering is thus argued to be dependent upon familiarity, rather than upon general temporal principles. This suggestion was investigated by using elicited imitation to assess 21-month-olds' recall of familiar-canonical, familiar-reversed, novel-causal, and novel-arbitrary event sequences. Subjects reproduced canonical and both types of novel sequences in modeled order. On reversed sequences they vacillated between reproducing the events as modeled and "correcting" them to canonical order. The results suggest that temporal organization is not imposed upon an existing unordered event representation, but rather, is an integral aspect of the representation from its initial construction. It is suggested that young children's difficulty with reversed sequences may be attributed to a reluctance to reorganize existing representations, rather than to the absence of applicable temporal principles. © 1990.