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

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