ABSTRACT
Despite the early and continued importance of event knowledge for predicting future events, relatively little research has focused on children's conceptualization of future events. However, conversations about the future may be just as important for young children to develop an explicit concept of future time as conversations about past events are for the development of autobiographic memory. Nelson (1996) argued that verbal social interactions are critical contexts for the development of time concepts. Preliminary concepts of sequence and reoccurrence may be grasped by very young, preverbal children, but to understand conventional time systems, children must learn how these fundamental time concepts are coordinated and quantified in language. For example, knowing what happens when you go to the playground and knowing that you go there frequently involves understanding the temporal concepts of sequence and reoccurrence, but knowing that one goes to the playground every Saturday involves understanding how reoccurrence is represented in the conventional units of days and weeks. Knowing that you go to the pool when it is warm outside places an event within a sequence of changing seasons; knowing that you go to the pool in summer involves coordinating that sequence into conventional concepts of seasons and annual cycles. Verbal discussions are critical for the development of conventional time concepts because conventional time concepts must be acquired through language. According to Nelson (1996), the concept of time is itself a social construction and it is conveyed to children through language:
The child alone cannot discover time, because (unlike concrete objects) it is not an entity that exits to be discovered. Rather, conceptions of process and change have led different societies to conceptualize time in different ways, and those ways are conveyed to children through language forms, (p. 288)
next" (e.g., Bauer, 1995). Using picture-sequencing tasks, research has shown that children develop a more complex understanding of the temporal structure of real-world events during the ages of 3 to 8 years (Benson, 1997; Friedman, 1977, 1986, 1990, 1991; Friedman & Brudos, 1988). Friedman conducted extensive research into children's representations of temporal structure using picture-sequencing tasks in which children are asked to order events along a time line relative to the present time or to a designated point within a sequence (e.g., breakfast). This line of research indicated that by 4 to 5 years of age, children in the United States can represent the temporal sequence of the main events in their day (Friedman, 1977,1990, 1992; Friedman & Brudos, 1988), by 6 to 7 years they can order seasonal events (Friedman, 1977,1990), and by 7 to 8 years they can correctly order cards listing the days in the week and months in the year (Friedman, 1977, 1986).
