Developing the competence with discourse connectives during teenage years

Built upon a combination of off-line production experiments and corpus analysis of data, this thesis provides a multifaceted investigation into the level of competence with discourse connectives during teenage years. Firstly, it discerns endogenous factors, related to the linguistic characteristics of connectives, that may render some of them more difficult than others. Secondly, it investigates exogenous factors, related to inter-individual differences in linguistic competence between young speakers, that may influence their mastery of discourse connectives. Thirdly, the current work also explores whether the mastery of connectives hinges on the context in which they are used. Furthermore, this thesis raises the question of young speakers’ sensitivity to different types of coherence signals spread in discourse, and whether they are receptive to non-connective cues when inferring coherence relations. Finally, this work also focuses on the potential for improving competence with connectives through learning activities. The evidence obtained in this work serves to both deepen our understanding of the development of the competence with connectives during a transitional period of teenage years and to enrich the ongoing discussion about the type of meaning that connectives encode, namely, whether this meaning is procedural, conceptual or a combination of both.

2023

dissertation

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