Do teenagers know how to use connectives from the written mode?

Connectives are complex lexical items for children, who do not even master connectives used frequently in speech until the end of their primary school years. In this paper, we assess the ability of two groups of 16-year-olds from two different academic levels (i.e., high school vs. professional school students), as well as a group of university students, to use four French connectives bound to the written mode in a constrained production task. These connectives were chosen to assess three potential sources of difficulties: the cognitive complexity of the encoded discourse relation, the connectives' frequency in corpus data, and their mono- or polyfunctional nature. Our results indicate that teenagers have a lower ability to use these connectives compared to university students, and frequency appears to be the best-suited factor to account for their difficulties. In addition, the teenage group with a higher academic level reached better accuracy with the two more frequent connectives tested. Taken together, our results indicate that teenagers do not yet have mastery over the wide array of connectives from the written mode in their native language, particularly those that are less frequent in corpus data. These connectives are especially problematic for teenagers with a lower academic background. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.