Identification of Standard of the Type and Number of Cohesion Devices in Children’s Texts

The present research deals with the identification of standard of the type and number of cohesion devices used in (10-12 years old) children’s texts. The database includes 400 (10-12 years old) texts written by children in Tehran, 60 stories by child writers, and 60 texts in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade course books. According to the findings, four types of conjunctive devices (additive, adversative, causal and temporal) are appeared in the texts written by 10-12 year-old children and the ones written for them (i.e., stories by child writers and texts in the course books). Furthermore, the comparison between the usage of conjunctive devices in both types of texts (i.e., productive and perceptive) showed that the standard of the type and number of cohesion devices indicate a kind of growth sequence in which additive devices appeared at first, followed by temporal devices, causal devices appearing next, and finally adversative devices are used. This process shows accumulative sequence of semantic growth; as a result, perception of coordination concept, sequence of occurrences, cause and effect relation, and contrast relation must have taken place for children. This finding is in line with that of Bloom et al. (1980), Kamari (2016), Shapiro and Hudson (1991) and Guna and Ngadiman (2015).