This study deals with the use of connectives in oral French narration. Seven- to
eleven-year-old native speakers of French told ‘silent’ comic
strip stories involving two characters to a same-age peer. The comic strips differed
from each other in the display mode (consecutive vs. simultaneous), the type of
event sequence (arbitrary vs. ordered) and the thematic continuity (continuous vs.
discontinuous). The analysis concerns the part of the children’s
narrations where the same character carried out a sequence of actions. The results
showed that: (1) more connectives were used when the speaker could see all the
pictures at once; (2) regardless of the type of sequence, connectives that marked a
temporal link outnumbered all others; and (3) thematic continuity promoted
temporal-link marking by 7-year-olds and causal-link marking by 11-year-olds. The
discussion addresses the conceptual determinants of the use of connectives,
particularly temporal markers, and the developmental findings obtained by
manipulating the conditions of production.
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