Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T06:15:24.594Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Acquiring Connectives in a First Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2024

Sandrine Zufferey
Affiliation:
University of Bern, Switzerland
Liesbeth Degand
Affiliation:
UCLouvain, Belgium
Get access

Summary

In this chapter, we first introduce the questions of when and how children start using connectives and discourse relations during their first years of life. We will see more specifically that mastering the complex form-function mappings involved in the understanding of many connectives is a complex task for young children. In addition, we will present research investigating school-age children’s comprehension of connectives, and show that it is only around the end of their primary school years that they fully understand frequent connectives. We will explore the causes of these difficulties, and discuss the differences between various connectives and discourse relations. We will then move on to other studies analyzing the way older children understand connectives, and see that their acquisition is not fully in place after primary school years, as teenagers keep developing their competence with connectives. Finally, we will briefly discuss the acquisition of connectives and discourse relations by children suffering from linguistic or cognitive impairments such as SLI and autism.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Further Reading

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×