The Role of Complexity in the Ability to Notice Incoherent Uses of Connectives for L2

When learning a second language, some connectives are more difficult to acquire and to master than others. While previous research has assessed different factors responsible for this difficulty by using offline tasks, little is known about the extent to which L2-readers are sensitive to different connectives while reading. In our study, we compared self-paced reading times of native and non-native speakers of French for sentences that were correctly or incorrectly marked with either the infrequent connective cependant ('however') or the more frequent mais ('but'). Results showed that incorrect uses only produced longer reading times when mais was used. Yet, in a sentence-evaluation-task using the same set of sentences, L2-speakers were able to discriminate incorrectly marked sentences with cependant from correctly marked ones. We conclude that a good theoretical understanding of connectives for L2 (Experiment 2) does not always warrant a quick activation of their meaning while reading (Experiment 1).