Language serves as an essential resource to learn about cause and effect throughout childhood. Causal adverbial sentences use causal conjunctions (e.g., because, so) to join two clauses to express cause-effect relationships (Diessel & Hetterle, 2011). Causal adverbial sentences are frequently used to explain causal relationships in academic contexts, such as elementary school science and social studies classes (Kinzie et al., 2014; Williams et al., 2014). Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are at risk for failure in these academically relevant language skills. Here, a multiple probe design was used to examine the effect of language intervention focused on causal adverbials on both causal adverbials and acquisition of academic content for preschool/kindergarten children with SLI. Child performance on sentence elicitation probes of causal adverbials and an untreated control structure were analyzed. Six of seven participants exhibited gains at some level in production of causal adverbials containing because. Performance on daily probes of science content learning, and science unit tests indicate that participants are able to learn science content, but the magnitude of gains may not relate to skill in causal adverbial production. Language intervention for young children with SLI can effectively treat complex syntactic targets such as causal adverbials in the context of science instruction, but it is unclear whether this can affect science content learning.

The diploma thesis is dealing with a description, emplacement and function of the causal adverbial complement in the contemporary French and Czech language. This paper is divided into a theoretical and a practical part. In the theoretical part, the topic of causality is elucidated and the notion of causal adverbial complement in the French and Czech linguistic terminology is defined. Further, it works with syntactic and semantic features of causal adverbial complement, observes the possible valence understanding of this sentence member, and deals with the question of its extra-predicative and intra-predicative emplacement, as well. Furthermore, the attention is drawn to the position of causal adverbial complement in a relationship to the functional sentence perspective. The practical part is dedicated to corpus analysis of the chosen causal utterances, which implement the causal adverbial complements. The main focus is given to their emplacement in the French and Czech sentence.