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A developmental cross-linguistic study of adversative connectives: French ‘mais’ and German ‘aber/sondern’*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Michèle Kail  and
Jürgen Weissenborn
Michèle Kail
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale associé au C.N.R.S., Paris
Jürgen Weissenborn
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen
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Abstract

This study concerns the acquisition of the meaning of adversative connectives in French and German children from 7; 8 to 9; 11. French mais has both a substitutive and a contrastive use which is expressed by two different connectives in German, i.e. sondern and aber. 36 French and 36 German children were tested in a completion and a judgement task. Two hypotheses are confirmed: (a) substitutive but is easier to process and hence is acquired earlier than contrastive but; (b) the interpretation of contrastive but-sentences depends on their inferential complexity relative to a given context. A third assumption about the facilitative effect of lexical differentiation in German was only partially supported by the data. This issue needs further investigation with more languages and younger children.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , February 1984 , pp. 143 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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