Individual Variations in the Mastery of Discourse Connectives from Teenage Years to Adulthood

Tckhovrebova, Ekaterina; Zufferey, Sandrine; Gygax, Pascal (2022). Individual Variations in the Mastery of Discourse Connectives from Teenage Years to Adulthood. Language learning, 72(2), pp. 412-455. Wiley 10.1111/lang.12481

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Many connectives, such as therefore and however, are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence-level insertion task (N = 307, aged 12 to 64) and a text-level insertion task (N = 172, aged 13 to 71). Our results indicate that, despite a general progression in the level of competence with age, the academic level of participants is a strong predictor of competence within each age group, even during adulthood. In addition, from the age of 12, competence is related to the frequency of connectives in naturalistic data, with frequent connectives systematically mastered better than less frequent ones. Finally, in all age groups, the use and understanding of connectives is more challenging when sentences to complete are embedded within a richer context than when presented alone.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of French Language and Literature

Graduate School:

Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities (GSAH)

UniBE Contributor:

Tckhovrebova, Ekaterina, Zufferey, Sandrine

Subjects:

400 Language
400 Language > 410 Linguistics
400 Language > 440 French & related languages
800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 840 French & related literatures

ISSN:

0023-8333

Publisher:

Wiley

Language:

English

Submitter:

Ekaterina Tckhovrebova

Date Deposited:

10 Mar 2022 08:38

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 16:10

Publisher DOI:

10.1111/lang.12481

Uncontrolled Keywords:

discourse connectives; teenagers; French; coherence relations

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/165910

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/165910

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