Abstract
This study examines the cohesive ties that children and adults use when offering verbal explanations to resolve incongruent discourse information. Age‐related changes in the participants' use of adversatives and causal connectives were observed. The results also revealed that preschoolers were less likely than the older children to use personal referents and demonstratives. Although fewer preschoolers than subjects at the older grade levels used ellipses, by first grade children were using this device to connect discourse information. Unexpectedly, the children's use of additives and temporal connectives did not decrease with age. The findings are discussed in terms of children's ability to retain information in working memory and to perform the necessary integrative processes. The connectives children use to link contiguous sentences reflect their reasoning about how story events go together.
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