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.

Connectives such as however and since play an important role for marking coherence relations in discourse and therefore are crucial for reading comprehension, which in turn is a strong predictor of academic success. Most research on the acquisition of connectives targeted younger children. Yet there is evidence that connective development extends well into adolescence and even adult speakers have difficulties with some coherence relations when they are conveyed by infrequent connectives bound to the written mode. In this paper, we tested the use of connectives encoding different coherence relations and bound to either the oral or the written modes. We studied the performance of native French-speaking teenagers (N = 154, Mage = 14.43, range: 12–19) in a cloze task and also assessed whether teenagers’ vocabulary level and degree of exposure to print predicted the accuracy of connective use. Our findings show that the ability to use connectives appropriately increases with age. However, age played a lesser role compared to vocabulary knowledge and degree of exposure to print, thus indicating that lexicon size and reading habits are important factors explaining individual differences in the acquisition of connectives.

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Important individual differences exist in the way language is acquired by children, and processed by adult native speakers. So far, studies demonstrating those individual differences have focused on lexical and syntactic aspects, yet not on discursive competences. However, we argue that discourse connectives are particularly well suited to investigate individual differences, as the ability to handle them lies at the interface of lexical, syntactic and discursive competence. In this chapter, we report a series of studies designed to investigate the ability of teenagers, learners and adults to use connectives typical of the written mode, and to assess its correlation with their degree of exposure to print. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that connectives that are less frequent in corpus data are also mastered less well even by adult native speakers, and that exposure to print explains the mastery of these connectives in all three groups.

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