French Pupils' Lexical and Grammatical Spelling from Sixth to Ninth Grade: A Longitudinal Study.

This paper presents the results of a longitudinal spelling study conducted among 496 school children, from sixth grade (the first year of middle school in France) to ninth grade (the fourth and final year of middle school in France). Its first objective is to examine the evolution of both lexical and grammatical spelling skills in a deep orthography and to present new findings on the advanced mastery of spelling skills. Its second aim is to provide insight into pupils' orthographic knowledge and remaining difficulties at the end of French compulsory schooling. Pupils were assessed using the same text dictation when they were sixth graders and when they were ninth graders. The data show that both lexical and grammatical performance increased from the sixth to ninth grade and that these interact with each other. The qualitative analysis of errors allows points of resistance in the acquisition of French orthography to be highlighted.

Syllable-first rather than letter-first to improve phonemic awareness.

The present study investigates the nature of the spelling-to-sound correspondences taught to enhance phonemic awareness in prereaders. The main assumption in the literature is that learning the alphabetic code through letter-to-phoneme correspondences is the best way to improve phonemic awareness. The alternative syllabic bridge hypothesis, based on the saliency and early availability of syllables, assumes that learning to associate letters to phonological syllables enables phoneme units to be the mirror of the letters and to become accessible, thereby developing phonemic awareness of prereaders. A total of 222 French-speaking prereaders took part in a 4-session learning program based on correspondences either between letters and syllables (letters-to-syllable group) or between letters and phonemes (letter-to-phoneme group), and the fifth last session on coding and decoding. Our results showed a greater increase in phonemic awareness in the letters-to-syllable group than in the letter-to-phoneme group. The present study suggests that teaching prereaders letters-to-syllable correspondences is a key to successful reading.

O papel da amplitude visuoatencional e da consciência fonêmica na aprendizagem da leitura / The role of visual attention span and phonemic awareness in learning to read

Este estudo objetivou verificar as relações entre amplitude visuoatencional (AVA), consciência fonêmica (CF) e desempenho em leitura em uma amostra de 48 alunos de 1º, 3º e 5º anos do ensino fundamental de uma escola pública de São Paulo. As crianças foram avaliadas em três sessões em tarefas de leitura de palavras isoladas, AVA, CF, inteligência não verbal, memória fonológica e limiar de identificação de letras. Os resultados indicam que a AVA e a CF se relacionam com a leitura desde o 1º até o 5º ano e que essas relações são mais fortes no 1º ano, mas continuam tendo um papel relevante no 3º ano e no 5º ano, principalmente na leitura de pseudopalavras e palavras irregulares.

This study aimed to verify the relationship between visual attention span (VAS), phonemic awareness (PA) and reading performance in a sample of 48 students from the 1st, 3rd and 5th grade from a public elementary school in Sao Paulo. Children were assessed in three sessions through a battery of tasks, which included single word reading, VAS, PA, nonverbal intelligence, phonological memory and letter identification threshold. Results showed that the VAS and PA correlated with performance in reading from 1st to 5th grade, and they play a more important role at 1st grade, but remain relevant in 3rd and 5th grade, especially in the reading of nonwords and irregular words.

Lexical orthography acquisition: Is handwriting better than spelling aloud?

Lexical orthography acquisition is currently described as the building of links between the visual forms and the auditory forms of whole words. However, a growing body of data suggests that a motor component could further be involved in orthographic acquisition. A few studies support the idea that reading plus handwriting is a better lexical orthographic learning situation than reading alone. However, these studies did not explore which of the cognitive processes involved in handwriting enhanced lexical orthographic acquisition. Some findings suggest that the specific movements memorized when learning to write may participate in the establishment of orthographic representations in memory. The aim of the present study was to assess this hypothesis using handwriting and spelling aloud as two learning conditions. In two experiments, fifth graders were asked to read complex pseudo-words embedded in short sentences. Immediately after reading, participants had to recall the pseudo-words' spellings either by spelling them aloud or by handwriting them down. One week later, orthographic acquisition was tested using two post-tests: a pseudo-word production task (spelling by hand in Experiment 1 or spelling aloud in Experiment 2) and a pseudo-word recognition task. Results showed no significant difference in pseudo-word recognition between the two learning conditions. In the pseudo-word production task, orthography learning improved when the learning and post-test conditions were similar, thus showing a massive encoding-retrieval match effect in the two experiments. However, a mixed model analysis of the pseudo-word production results revealed a significant learning condition effect which remained after control of the encoding-retrieval match effect. This later finding suggests that orthography learning is more efficient when mediated by handwriting than by spelling aloud, whatever the post-test production task.

Lexical neighborhood effects in pseudoword spelling.

The general aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive processes that underpin skilled adult spelling. More specifically, it investigates the influence of lexical neighbors on pseudo-word spelling with the goal of providing a more detailed account of the interaction between lexical and sublexical sources of knowledge in spelling. In prior research examining this topic, adult participants typically heard lists composed of both words and pseudo-words and had to make a lexical decision to each stimulus before writing the pseudo-words. However, these priming paradigms are susceptible to strategic influence and may therefore not give a clear picture of the processes normally engaged in spelling unfamiliar words. In our two Experiments involving 71 French-speaking literate adults, only pseudo-words were presented which participants were simply requested to write to dictation using the first spelling that came to mind. Unbeknownst to participants, pseudo-words varied according to whether they did or did not have a phonological word neighbor. Results revealed that low-probability phoneme/grapheme mappings (e.g., /o/ -> aud in French) were used significantly more often in spelling pseudo-words with a close phonological lexical neighbor with that spelling (e.g., /krepo/ derived from "crapaud," /krapo/) than in spelling pseudo-words with no close neighbors (e.g., /frøpo/). In addition, the strength of this lexical influence increased with the lexical frequency of the word neighbors as well as with their degree of phonetic overlap with the pseudo-word targets. These results indicate that information from lexical and sublexical processes is integrated in the course of spelling, and a specific theoretical account as to how such integration may occur is introduced.

Developmental dyslexia: the visual attention span deficit hypothesis.

The visual attention (VA) span is defined as the amount of distinct visual elements which can be processed in parallel in a multi-element array. Both recent empirical data and theoretical accounts suggest that a VA span deficit might contribute to developmental dyslexia, independently of a phonological disorder. In this study, this hypothesis was assessed in two large samples of French and British dyslexic children whose performance was compared to that of chronological-age matched control children. Results of the French study show that the VA span capacities account for a substantial amount of unique variance in reading, as do phonological skills. The British study replicates this finding and further reveals that the contribution of the VA span to reading performance remains even after controlling IQ, verbal fluency, vocabulary and single letter identification skills, in addition to phoneme awareness. In both studies, most dyslexic children exhibit a selective phonological or VA span disorder. Overall, these findings support a multi-factorial view of developmental dyslexia. In many cases, developmental reading disorders do not seem to be due to phonological disorders. We propose that a VA span deficit is a likely alternative underlying cognitive deficit in dyslexia.

The cognitive deficits responsible for developmental dyslexia: review of evidence for a selective visual attentional disorder.

There is strong converging evidence suggesting that developmental dyslexia stems from a phonological processing deficit. However, this hypothesis has been challenged by the widely admitted heterogeneity of the dyslexic population, and by several reports of dyslexic individuals with no apparent phonological deficit. In this paper, we discuss the hypothesis that a phonological deficit may not be the only core deficit in developmental dyslexia and critically examine several alternative proposals. To establish that a given cognitive deficit is causally related to dyslexia, at least two conditions need to be fulfilled. First, the hypothesized deficit needs to be associated with developmental dyslexia independently of additional phonological deficits. Second, the hypothesized deficit must predict reading ability, on both empirical and theoretical grounds. While most current hypotheses fail to fulfil these criteria, we argue that the visual attentional deficit hypothesis does. Recent studies providing evidence for the independence of phonological and visual attentional deficits in developmental dyslexia are reviewed together with empirical data showing that phonological and visual attentional processing skills contribute independently to reading performance. A theoretical model of reading is outlined in support of a causal link between a visual attentional disorder and a failure in reading acquisition.