Scripts and Scraps: The Development of Sequential Understanding

O'CONNELL, BARBARA G., and GERARD, ANTHONY B. Scripts and Scraps: The Development of Sequential Understanding. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1985, 56, 671-681. This study examines the extent to which knowing that certain things go together and knowing how they do are independent aspects of the developing cognitive system. In an elicited imitation task, 20-, 24-, 28-, and 36-monthold children were presented with 3 types of sequences: events in a canonical (familiar) order, these same events in reversed order, and scrambled sequences consisting of unrelated components of the canonical sequences. Canonical and reversed sequences elicited more modeled behaviors from children of all ages than did scrambled sequences. Although 20-month-olds appeared to discriminate between meaningful sequences and those that are not, the 24-month-olds were the youngest group able to reproduce the modeled order of canonical sequences. At 28 months, children corrected the order of reversed sequences to make it conform to canonical order. Only 36-month-olds reliably reproduced the order of scrambled sequences. That the youngest subjects could distinguish familiar, ordered sequences from series of unrelated actions before they could reproduce the order of any type of sequence suggests that temporal organization is imposed upon primitive representations of familiar events.