In this chapter, we first introduce the questions of when and how children start using connectives and discourse relations during their first years of life. We will see more specifically that mastering the complex form-function mappings involved in the understanding of many connectives is a complex task for young children. In addition, we will present research investigating school-age children’s comprehension of connectives, and show that it is only around the end of their primary school years that they fully understand frequent connectives. We will explore the causes of these difficulties, and discuss the differences between various connectives and discourse relations. We will then move on to other studies analyzing the way older children understand connectives, and see that their acquisition is not fully in place after primary school years, as teenagers keep developing their competence with connectives. Finally, we will briefly discuss the acquisition of connectives and discourse relations by children suffering from linguistic or cognitive impairments such as SLI and autism.

In this chapter, we discuss the way people read, remember and understand discourse, depending on the type of relations that link discourse segments together. We also illustrate the role of connectives and other discourse signals as elements guiding readers’ interpretation. Throughout the chapter, we review empirical evidence from experiments that involve various methodologies such as offline comprehension tasks, self-paced reading, eye-tracking and event related potentials. One of the major findings is that not all relations are processed and remembered in the same way. It seems that causal relations play a special role for creating coherence in discourse, as they are processed more quickly and remembered better. Conversely, because they are highly expected, causal relations benefit less from the presence of connectives compared to discontinuous relations like concession and confirmation. Finally, research shows that in their native language, speakers are able to take advantage of all sorts of connectives for discourse processing, even those restricted to the written mode, and those that are ambiguous.

In this chapter, we first present the extent of cross-linguistic differences in the uses of discourse connectives and relations, and discuss their implications for theories of discourse. We make a distinction between discourse relations, that seem to exist in all languages and their mapping onto specific connectives that is most of the time language-specific. We also present the kind of data that can be used to perform contrastive studies, emphasizing their advantages and limitations. Connectives are also used quite differently across different genres within the same language. These differences are particularly evident between spoken and written genres. We present the variations linked to genres in this chapter, and underline the necessity to develop more cross-linguistic studies that are also varied in terms of genres. Results from corpus studies comparing languages or genres have increasingly been used as input for experimental research. We discuss in particular how observations about connective usage across genres has been important for studies analyzing discourse processing, as well as first and second language acquisition