Contextual influences on children's spoken and written explanations

ABSTRACT The relative influences of medium and context variables were investigated by comparing 7- and 8-year-old children's spoken and written explanations in varying contexts: a story task, a question task, a sentence completion task, and a whole sentence production task. In the story task, performance in a “purpose” condition (which provided a specific communicative purpose for the production of an explanation) was compared with performance in a “neutral” condition. The frequency of explanations containing correct causal expressions was significantly higher in the purpose condition than in the neutral condition and significantly lower in the story task than in the three more structured tasks. In contrast to these contextual influences, performance in the written medium was very similar to performance in the spoken medium.