French-speaking teenagers’ mastery of connectives: the role of vocabulary size and exposure to print

Abstract

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.

Exploring the Sensitivity to Alternative Signals of Coherence Relations

“…In contrast to Scholman et al (2020), we did not find an effect of the author recognition test on the sensitivity to non-connective list signals both for teenagers and adults. Although the French versions of the ART were strong predictors for the use of connectives in other studies (Tskhovrebova, Zufferey & Tribushinina, 2022;Zufferey & Gygax, 2020b), it probably requires further validation in French. As a matter of fact, the French version of this test included 80 items, while the English ART, used by Scholman et al (2020), consisted of 130 items, which might have rendered this version a more sensitive measure.…”

“…To identify whether the sensitivity to these signals in young speakers also varies depending on individual differences in linguistic competence, we assessed the participants' degree of exposure to print, as measured by adapted French versions of the author recognition test (Tskhovrebova, Zufferey & Tribushinina, 2022;Zufferey & Gygax, 2020a).…”

“…To assess teenagers' degree of exposure to print, we used an adapted version of the author recognition test (ART) (Tskhovrebova, Zufferey & Tribushinina, 2022), since the ART is not only sensitive to cultural differences (e.g., Stainthorp, 1997) but also to age (e.g., Cunningham & Stanovich, 1990). This version of the ART (ART-F-CL) was based on the names of Frenchspeaking authors who are considered to be classics according to three Swiss and French national libraries and bookshop chains.…”

Upaya Mahasiswa Akuntansi dalam Meningkatkan Produktivitas Kinerja pada Fase Putus Cinta

“…Generasi milenial kebanyakan memilih dan memutuskan untuk bekerja setelah lulus dari Sekolah Menengah Atas karena beranggapan bahwa di usia yang akan menginjak kedewasaan tidak ingin lagi membebani orang tua terutama pada masalah biaya hidup tetapi tidak sedikit juga yang memilih untuk melanjutkan sekolah ke tingkat yang lebih tinggi (Dariyo, 2020). Bahkan ada juga yang memilih dan memutuskan untuk bekerja dibarengi dengan kuliah (Artawan, 2019;Davidova, 2020;Sanyal, 2021;Tan, 2020;Tskhovrebova, 2022Tskhovrebova, , 2023. Sebagai manusia yang telah mencapai usia dewasa, individu akan masa transisi peran sosial, individu dewasa akan menindaklanjuti hubungan dengan pasangannya dengan menikah dan membentuk keluarga yang baru (Hurlock, 2018).…”

Effects of individual differences in text exposure on sentence comprehension

“…Reading experience predicts individual differences in vocabulary size 15 , 16 , lexical decision times 17 , verbal fluency 15 , sentence production 18 , 19 and various aspects of sentence comprehension 20 – 31 . One proposed hypothesis for the observed effects of reading experience on sentence comprehension is greater experience with a subset of sentence types that are more frequent in written language, such as passives 24 , 31 , relative clauses 20 , 23 , 30 , or constructions containing connectives such as however or since 29 , 32 . Our approach is to link the statistical properties of speech and text to observed patterns of sentence processing.…”