The development of connectives in three to five-year-old monolingual Spanish-speaking children

Abstract

Little attention has been paid to the expansion in the use of connectives in children that are acquiring Spanish as a first language. Considering that language structure emerges from language use, naturalistic data were utilised from two conversational corpora. 12 types of connectives showed significant expansion, with the conditional conjunction si 'if' presenting the greatest advance, followed by que 'that' used as relative pronoun with explicit antecedent and as completive conjunction. We observed that the interordination and subordination relationships progressed more than those of coordination; however, certain connective elements between coordinated constructions displayed a more notable expansion as discourse markers, in the interactional level.