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