Error-monitoring: A predictor of future reading skills? A 3-year longitudinal study in children.

Investigation of the factors explaining individual differences in the acquisition of expert reading skills has become of particular interest these last decades. Non-verbal abilities, such as visual attention and executive functions play an important role in reading acquisition. Among those non-verbal factors, error-monitoring, which allows one to detect one's own errors and to avoid repeating them in the future, has been reported to be impaired in dyslexic readers. The present three-year longitudinal study aims at determining whether error-monitoring efficiency evaluated before and during reading instruction could improve the explanation of reading skills. To do so, 85 children will be followed from the last year of kindergarten to the second grade. The classic predictors of reading will be assessed at each grade level. Error-monitoring indices in domain-general and reading-related contexts will be derived from EMG data recorded during a Simon task in kindergarten and during both a Simon and a lexical decision tasks in the first and second grades. Findings concerning the role of error-monitoring on reading skills are expected to have an important impact on reading instruction to prevent reading difficulties in at-risk children and improve remediation to help children with reading difficulties.

The dynamics of morphological processing in developing readers: A cross-linguistic masked priming study.

Empirical evidence from masked priming research shows that skilled readers can rapidly identify morphological structure in written language. However, comparatively little is known about how and when this skill is acquired in children. The current work investigated the developmental trajectory of morphological processing in a 2-year longitudinal study involving two large cohorts of German and French primary school children. The masked priming paradigm was used within an experimental design that allowed us to dissociate effects of (a) nonmorphological embedded word activation, (b) morpho-orthographic decomposition, and (c) morpho-semantics. Four priming conditions were used: affixed word (farmer-FARM), affixed nonword (farmity-FARM), nonaffixed nonword (farmald-FARM), and unrelated control (workald-FARM). The results revealed robust embedded word priming effects across both languages. However, morpho-orthographic and morpho-semantic effects were evident only in the French sample. These findings are discussed in the context of a theoretical framework that specifies the distinct roles played by embedded words and affixes, their distinct developmental trajectories, and how the intrinsic linguistic properties of a given language may affect morphological processing.

Orthographic consistency influences morphological processing in reading aloud: Evidence from a cross-linguistic study.

The present study investigated whether morphological processing in reading is influenced by the orthographic consistency of a language or its morphological complexity. Developing readers in Grade 3 and skilled adult readers participated in a reading aloud task in four alphabetic orthographies (English, French, German, Italian), which differ in terms of both orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. English is the least consistent, in terms of its spelling-to-sound relationships, as well as the most morphologically sparse, compared to the other three. Two opposing hypotheses were formulated. If orthographic consistency modulated the use of morphology in reading, readers of English should show more robust morphological processing than readers of the other three languages, because morphological units increase the reliability of spelling-to-sound mappings in the English language. In contrast, if the use of morphology in reading depended on the morphological complexity of a language, readers of French, German, and Italian should process morphological units in printed letter strings more efficiently than readers of English. Both developing and skilled readers of English showed greater morphological processing than readers of the other three languages. These results support the idea that the orthographic consistency of a language, rather than its morphological complexity, influences the extent to which morphology is used during reading. We explain our findings within the remit of extant theories of reading acquisition and outline their theoretical and educational implications.