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

Abstract

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.

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

“…The mastery of connectives not only depends on the factors related to properties of connectives but also varies according to individual characteristics of teenagers. Previous studies, for instance, found variation related to teenagers' age (e.g., Nippold et al, 1992), reading proficiency ( Van Silfhout et al, 2015), and academic background operationalized as different educational tracks followed by the pupils (Tskhovrebova et al, 2022;Van Silfhout et al, 2015;Zufferey & Gygax, 2020b). Our study continues this line of research and aims to gain a better understanding of individual variation and to reveal other potential sources of individual differences.…”

“…The authors suggested that frequency was likely to be an important predictor only in their post hoc explanation of the results. This idea was later confirmed by other researchers who designed their experiments taking into account the effects of frequency (Tskhovrebova et al, 2022;Zufferey & Gygax, 2020b). In both studies, the authors examined the usage of four French connectives that are mostly used in writing, encode different coherence relations, and have different frequencies in written corpora.…”

“…Lastly, we aim to determine how important the age factor is, in comparison to vocabulary level and exposure to print. Previous research on the acquisition of connectives by older children indicates that this predictor is less strong than teenagers' academic background (Tskhovrebova et al, 2022). In striking contrast, in studies involving primary school children, age was always found to be one of the strongest predictors of connective usage and comprehension (e.g., Blything et al, 2015;Cain & Nash, 2011;Pyykkönen & Järvikivi, 2012).…”

“…Consequently, it is plausible to assume that connectives that are mostly used in writing are mastered less well than those bound to oral speech. There are studies that operationalized degree of connective familiarity through their frequency in corpora (Nippold et al, 1992;Tskhovrebova et al, 2022;Zufferey & Gygax, 2020b). However, even in these studies, which disentangled the effects of mode and frequency by studying only the connectives common for the written mode, frequency was still found to be an important predictor of connective use (Nippold et al, 1992;Tskhovrebova et al, 2022;Zufferey & Gygax, 2020b).…”

“…RQ4: Does the competence to appropriately use connectives increase with age during teenage years? H4: Regarding the role of age, we hypothesize that, in this age group, biological age will play a less prominent role than vocabulary size and exposure to print (Tskhovrebova et al, 2022).…”