This study investigated second language distribution of Chinese connectives by tallying responses on a mini-discourse completion test taken by English-speaking learners with different language learning backgrounds and at different proficiency levels. The results showed that an underuse pattern underlay practically all Chinese connectives as a result of learners’ attention distributed among the three layers of language (i.e. semantic-lexical, syntactic-structural, and discourse-textual layers). The underuse of Chinese connectives, especially for obligatorily paired ones, was moderated by learners’ heritage language background and increased proficiency. Even though Chinese connectives’ syntactic position/obligatoriness effect was not evinced, learners demonstrated sensitivity to the cognitive complexity of semantic relationships marked by connectives, producing more connectives to signal more cognitively complex relationships in general. Meanwhile, the cognitive complexity of connectives seemed to have a threshold effect that beyond a certain level, the excessive cognitive load imposed on learners diminished their use of connectives. This study sheds light on the understanding of Chinese connectives as a multifaceted discourse grammar in second language acquisition.
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