Clause connectors such as therefore or although are used in order to clarify complex coherence relations. This is particularly relevant in academic language which is based on written language. Therefore, the aim of the present three studies is to investigate primary school children’s comprehension of clause connectors.
Based on results on the development of clause connector comprehension, we analyze at first whether the comprehension of different types of clause connectors changes during middle primary school. The results of study I reveal that children—regardless of their grade and family language—seem to process sentences containing
connectors in a rather shallow way based on their world knowledge thereby disregarding the embedded connectors. In study II, this finding is confirmed by analyzing the children’s response patterns to items specifically constructed to investigate this assumption. The results support the conclusion that the children use a world knowledge strategy and barely take the connectors into account. Hence, it is tested in study III whether children do show basic clause connector knowledge in other tasks. The results indicate that this is thoroughly the case, even though inter-individual and connector-related differences become apparent. The findings are discussed with a view to the development of clause connector comprehension and the spontaneous use of the acquired clause connector knowledge.