Young children have difficulties in understanding untypical causal relations. Although we know that hearing a causal description facilitates this understanding, less is known about what particular features of causal language are responsible for this facilitation. Here, we asked two questions. First, do syntactic and morphological cues in the grammatical structure of sentences facilitate the extraction of causal meaning? Second, do these different cues influence this facilitation to different degrees? We studied children learning either Swiss German or Turkish, two languages that differ in their expression of causality. Swiss German predominantly uses lexical causatives (e.g., schniidä [cut]), which lack a formal marker to denote causality. Turkish, alongside lexical causatives, uses morphological causatives, which formally mark causation (e.g., ye [eat] vs. yeDIr [feed]). We tested 2.5- to 3.5-year-old children’s understanding of untypical cause–effect relations described with either noncausal language (e.g., Here is a cube and a car) or causal language using a pseudo-verb (e.g., lexical: The cube gorps the car). We tested 135 Turkish-learning children (noncausal, lexical, and morphological conditions) and 90 Swiss-German-learning children (noncausal and lexical conditions). Children in both language groups performed better in the causal language condition(s) than in the noncausal language condition. Furthermore, Turkish-learning children’s performance in both the lexical and morphological conditions was similar to that of Swiss-German-learning children in the lexical condition and did not differ from each other. These findings suggest that the structural cues of causal language support children’s understanding of untypical causal relations regardless of the type of construction.

幼儿难以理解非典型的因果关系。虽然我们知道听到因果描述有助于理解，但我们对因果语言的哪些特定特征导致这种理解知之甚少。在这里，我们问了两个问题。首先，句子语法结构中的句法和形态线索是否有助于提取因果意义？其次，这些不同的线索是否会在不同程度上影响这种促进？我们研究了学习瑞士德语或土耳其语的儿童，这两种语言在因果关系的表达上有所不同。瑞士德语主要使用词汇使因（例如，schniidä [ cut])，缺乏正式的标记来表示因果关系。土耳其语与词法原因一起使用形态学上的原因，正式标记因果关系（例如，ye [ eat ] 与 yeDIr [ feed ]）。我们测试了 2.5 至 3.5 岁儿童对非因果语言（例如，这是一个立方体和汽车）或使用伪动词（例如，词汇：立方体gorps）的因果语言描述的非典型因果关系的理解汽车）。我们测试了 135 名学习土耳其语的儿童（非因果、词汇和形态条件）和 90 名学习瑞士德语的儿童（非因果和词汇条件）。两个语言组的儿童在因果语言条件下的表现都优于在非因果语言条件下的表现。此外，土耳其语学习儿童在词汇和形态条件下的表现与瑞士德语学习儿童在词汇条件下的表现相似，彼此没有区别。这些发现表明，因果语言的结构线索支持儿童对非典型因果关系的理解，而不管构建的类型如何。