Sentence connectors in french children's monologue performance

Abstract

Abstract Sentence connectors play a principle role in the construction of texts. Learning to use sentence connectors, then, is an important step in the acquisition of skills necessary for the production of oral monologues. This work describes six monolingual French speaking children's (ages 3;2 to 4;10) uses of high frequency oral discourse connectors in nursery school situated narrative performance. The results show that part of the developmental process involves enlarging the set of connectors in the developing lexicon. In addition it is shown that children fine-tune the uses of early acquired connectors in part by replacing existing functions with semantically more appropriate connectors. Finally, it is shown that important in learning the appropriate conditions controlling high frequency connectors is learning when not to use them.