130    LANG-UAGE   AND   MENTAL  DEVELOPMENT  OF  CHILDREN
It may, perhaps, be usefully added that the brighter children
at the top of the junior school learn to make free use of some of
the rhetorical devices dependent on word-order for their effect;
these are mostly the tricks of inversion which they have come
upon, and been impressed by, in their reading—for example,
was the answer•; said he*, thus was ended a delightful day.
It must be clear that the field of inquiry indicated in the above
paragraphs is still largely virgin soil for the student interested
in children's linguistic development; it is not only unculti-
vated, it is unexplored.
ii. narrative technique
The relation of two events in time wjiich do not occur in
simple succession is described most naturally by means of a
time-clause. Indeed, as has already been shown, the first type
of dependent clause to be used freely by children in their writing
is the dependent adverbial time-clause introduced by the connec-
tive when. In some schools, 90 per cent, of the dependent clauses
used by children of seven and eight years of age are when clauses.
During the primary stage of education children learn to vary
when with after, while, and as, and to show some appreciation of
the distinctive meaning of each of these connectives. By the*
age of ten and a half most of the temporal connectives are to be
found in the written compositions of children, the least frequently
used being since, as soon as, and before.
In the post-primary years the better read children soon begin
to employ participial, gerundial, and absolute expressions as a
further means of showing the relation of events in time. It
appeared very often, however, in the essays analysed that a
child would employ a particular form at all costs over and over
again, as though it were a trick he had just picked up more or
less mechanically from his reading. The percentage of participial
and similar expressions in relation to the total number of clauses
and simple sentences found was not high at any age and did not
rise above 5 per cent, even at the age of fourteen.
As early as the ages of seven and eight the average child has
already become accustomed to the colloquial use of the active
participles and the gerund; he will have talked and written, for
example, a good deal in terms of such phrases as go shopping,
sit knitting, saw the horse running away, heard mother calling me, and
so on. But the literary constructions represented, for example,
by such a form as Sitting up, I reached for the bell-rope, do not appear
spontaneously in any number in children's work till the post-
primary stage has been reached.