Coherence and connectedness in the development of discourse production

This paper discusses discourse components in writing, especially the relationship between coherence and connectedness, and examines connectedness in children 's written essays and narratives. Developmental trends were observed in the number of local sentence-to-sentence connectiom children wrote between adjacent sentences and in the type ofconnective device used. Essays by sixth and eighth graders showed a higher proportion of local connections than did those by second and fourth graders, and the local connections changed from a majonty ofreference connections in second grade essays to an increasing use of complex syntactic connections in eighth grade essays. Text form also influenced writing. The level of connectedness was higher in narratives than in essays. The narrative form also influenced the type of connective device used, especially in the writing of younger children. Writing from each grade level was modeled, and the developmental differences are described in Computer simulations äs differences in procedures used to scan and retrieve Information from memory.