This paper focuses on the acquisition of linguistic devices used for discourse cohesion inChinese and French. Particular attention is paid to how two types of learners (child L1[Chinese, French] and adult L2 [Chinese learning French]) acquire thelinguistic means for marking topics, in particular French dislocation,and itsdiscourse-pragmatic functions. Data consist of narratives based on picture sequences, producedin absence of mutual knowledge. Previous studies in L2 acquisition have shown that, at earlystages, adult learners' utterances and texts are organized along semantic and pragmaticprinciples, rather than along structural ones. These principles play a preponderant role in Chineseas well. French shares this tendency with Chinese, insofar as particular utterancepatterns—dislocations—mark topic and antitopic. Results show that Frenchchildren have to acquire the discourse functions related to dislocations. Postbasic-variety adultlearners readily use French dislocations to mark—appropriately—a variety ofdiscourse-pragmatic functions. However, the adult learners quite often use forms that deviatefrom the dislocated form found in target language French. This is all the more interesting becausethe chosen forms, though not usable without a certain context in standard French, do occur incolloquial French and are clearly functionally related to the target forms.