Abstract
Important individual differences exist in the way language is acquired by children, and processed by adult native speakers. So far, studies demonstrating those individual differences have focused on lexical and syntactic aspects, yet not on discursive competences. However, we argue that discourse connectives are particularly well suited to investigate individual differences, as the ability to handle them lies at the interface of lexical, syntactic and discursive competence. In this chapter, we report a series of studies designed to investigate the ability of teenagers, learners and adults to use connectives typical of the written mode, and to assess its correlation with their degree of exposure to print. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that connectives that are less frequent in corpus data are also mastered less well even by adult native speakers, and that exposure to print explains the mastery of these connectives in all three groups.
