The nature of the phonological processing in French dyslexic children: evidence for the phonological syllable and linguistic features' role in silent reading and speech discrimination

This study investigated the status of phonological representations in French dyslexic children (DY) compared with reading level- (RL) and chronological age-matched (CA) controls. We focused on the syllable’s role and on the impact of French linguistic features. In Experiment 1, we assessed oral discrimination abilities of pairs of syllables that varied as a function of voicing, mode or place of articulation, or syllable structure. Results suggest that DY children underperform controls with a ‘speed-accuracy’ deficit. However, DY children exhibit some similar processing than those highlighted in controls. As in CA and RL controls, DY children have difficulties in processing two sounds that only differ in voicing, and preferentially process obstruent rather than fricative sounds, and more efficiently process CV than CCV syllables. In Experiment 2, we used a modified version of the Colé, Magnan, and Grainger's (Applied Psycholinguistics 20:507–532, 1999) paradigm. Results show that DY children underperform CA controls but outperform RL controls. However, as in CA and RL controls, data reveal that DY children are able to use phonological procedures influenced by initial syllable frequency. Thus, DY children process syllabically high-frequency syllables but phonemically process low-frequency syllables. They also exhibit lexical and syllable frequency effects. Consequently, results provide evidence that DY children performances can be accounted for by laborious phonological syllable-based procedures and also degraded phonological representations.     

Computer-based assessment of reading ability and subtypes of readers with reading comprehension difficulties: a study in French children from G2 to G9

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Reading difficulties in school are very challenging for teachers due to many different reader subtypes in one and the same class. Moreover, there are...     

Effects of targeted interventions and of specific instructional time on reading ability in French children in grade 1

European Journal of Psychology of Education - The aim is to examine the impact of interventions on fluency and reading comprehension and how the effects of these interventions depend on the time...     

Do Consonant Sonority and Status Influence Syllable-Based Segmentation Strategies in a Visual Letter Detection Task? Developmental Evidence in French Children

This article queries whether consonant sonority (sonorant vs. obstruent) and status (coda vs. onset) within intervocalic clusters influence syllable-based segmentation strategies. We used a modified version of the illusory conjunction paradigm to test whether French beginning, intermediate, and advanced readers were sensitive to an optimal “sonorant coda–obstruent onset” sonority profile within the syllable boundaries as a cue for a syllable-based segmentation. Data showed that children used a syllable-based segmentation that improved with reading skills and age. The results are discussed to support that the visual letter detection within pseudowords primarily and early relies on acoustic-phonetic cues within the syllable boundaries, whereas the syllable effect seems to be developmentally constrained by reading skills and age.     

Knowledge about word structure in beginning readers: what specific links are there with word reading and spelling?

The present study had two aims: (1) to examine kindergarten (Kg) and first grade (G1) children’s early word structure knowledge, that is letter, phonological, morphological, and orthographic knowledge, and (2) to provide evidence of specific links between these various types of knowledge and word reading and spelling performance assessed in G1. A short longitudinal study was conducted with French-speaking children. Beyond phonological and morphological knowledge, identified here as in many other studies, the results provided evidence of a level of orthographic knowledge in the Kg children who exhibited an ability to process graphotactic constraints (i.e., legal combinations of letters). Moreover, whatever the type of items (affixed, pseudo-affixed, regular, or irregular words) being processed, either in reading or in spelling, letter naming was seen to be the strongest predictor of reading and spelling performance. The second important predictor related to phonological knowledge and more particularly phoneme extraction as a proximal predictor. Morphological knowledge appeared to be less important, and finally, the smallest contribution was made by orthographic knowledge.     

Comprehension of written sentences as a core component of children's reading comprehension

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that sentence processing is an essential mediatory skill between word recognition and text comprehension in reading. In Experiment 1, a semantic similarity judgement task was used with children from Grade 2 to Grade 9. They had to say whether two written sentences had the same (or very similar) meanings or whether the meanings of the two sentences were very different. As expected, performance improved with age both on the high‐frequency words and with increasingly complex sentences. In Experiment 2 with children in Grade 3, scores in written sentence comprehension and vocabulary made the most important unique contribution to the reading comprehension of an expository text. The results are discussed first, in the light of a general framework in which sentence‐level skill is at the core of reading comprehension and second, with reference to the issue of reading assessment.     

The development of epiphonological and metaphonological processing at the start of learning to read: A longitudinal study

The processes involved in the processing of phonological information (awareness and phonological recoding) now occupy a key position in the study of the acquisition of reading. The research performed in the field of learning to read have helped support the idea that the learning of writing is based on the ability to develop a phonological knowledge of the formal properties of the spoken language (Mattingly, 1972). Many studies have therefore been devoted to the relations between the learning of reading and phonological skills, that is to say the ability to perform a phonological analysis of spoken language. The present research concerns the development of the phonological skills both before and during the teaching of reading through the longitudinal study of children in their final year of nursery school (NS) and in first grade (FG).     

Is syllable segmentation developmentally constrained by consonant sonority within syllable boundaries in silent reading? Evidence in French children

There is agreement that French typically reading children use syllable‐sized units to segment words. Although the statistical properties of the initial syllables or the clusters within syllable boundaries seem to be crucial for syllable segmentation, little is known about the role of consonant sonority in silent reading. In two experiments that used audio‐visual and visual pseudoword recognition tasks with 300 French typically developing children, we showed a progressive increase in the use of syllable segmentation from the first through fifth years of reading instruction. The children were influenced both by an optimal ‘sonorant coda–obstruent onset’ sonority profile and by the individual position‐dependent consonant sonority within syllable boundaries. Orthographic and phonological statistical properties did not clearly modulate the response patterns. We provide innovative data to help further understand the developmental course of the use of syllable segmentation as determined by sonority. We discuss our results in the light of linguistic principles.