Morphology as an aid in orthographic learning of new words: The influence of inflected and derived forms in spelling acquisition.

Prior studies have shown that children are sensitive to the principle of root consistency, whereby root morphemes retain their spelling across related words. The current study used an implicit learning situation to examine, in 56 third grade and 56 fifth grade French-speaking children, whether orthographic learning of new morphologically simple words ending in a silent letter benefited from morphological relatedness with inflected and derived forms. In the morphological condition, the new words (e.

Children benefit from morphological relatedness independently of orthographic relatedness when they learn to spell new words.

We examined whether French children in Grades 3 and 5 (aged ∼ 8-11 years) benefit from morphological relatedness beyond orthographic relatedness in the implicit learning of new spellings. Children silently read stories that included two target nonwords. One nonword was in an opaque condition in that nothing in the story could justify the spelling of its final sound.

Familiar units prevail over statistical cues in word segmentation.

In language acquisition research, the prevailing position is that listeners exploit statistical cues, in particular transitional probabilities between syllables, to discover words of a language. However, other cues are also involved in word discovery. Assessing the weight learners give to these different cues leads to a better understanding of the processes underlying speech segmentation.

The influence of graphotactic knowledge on adults' learning of spelling.

Three experiments investigated whether and how the learning of spelling by French university students is influenced by the graphotactic legitimacy of the spellings. Participants were exposed to three types of novel spellings: AB, which do not contain doublets (e.g.

New evidence for chunk-based models in word segmentation.

There is large evidence that infants are able to exploit statistical cues to discover the words of their language. However, how they proceed to do so is the object of enduring debates. The prevalent position is that words are extracted from the prior computation of statistics, in particular the transitional probabilities between syllables.

How do we code the letters of a word when we have to write it? Investigating double letter representation in French.

How do we code the letters of a word when we have to write it? We examined whether the orthographic representations that the writing system activates have a specific coding for letters when these are doubled in a word. French participants wrote words on a digitizer. The word pairs shared the initial letters and differed on the presence of a double letter (e.

Further evidence for the interaction of central and peripheral processes: the impact of double letters in writing English words.

Most studies on spelling processes suppose that the activation of orthographic representations is over before we start to write. The goal of the present study was to provide evidence indicating that the orthographic representations activated during spelling production interact continuously with the motor processes during movement production. We manipulated gemination to assess the influence of the orthographic properties of words on the kinematic parameters of production.

For a psycholinguistic model of handwriting production: testing the syllable-bigram controversy.

This study examined the theoretical controversy on the impact of syllables and bigrams in handwriting production. French children and adults wrote words on a digitizer so that we could collect data on the local, online processing of handwriting production. The words differed in the position of the lowest frequency bigram.

Validated intraclass correlation statistics to test item performance models.

A new method, with an application program in Matlab code, is proposed for testing item performance models on empirical databases. This method uses data intraclass correlation statistics as expected correlations to which one compares simple functions of correlations between model predictions and observed item performance. The method rests on a data population model whose validity for the considered data is suitably tested and has been verified for three behavioural measure databases.

Orthographic influences in spoken word recognition: the consistency effect in semantic and gender categorization tasks.

According to current models, spoken word recognition is driven by the phonological properties of the speech signal. However, several studies have suggested that orthographic information also influences recognition in adult listeners. In particular, it has been repeatedly shown that, in the lexical decision task, words that include rimes with inconsistent spellings (e.

Competition effects in phonological priming: the role of mismatch position between primes and targets.

In three experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments 1A and 1B showed that an inhibitory priming effect occurred when the primes mismatched the targets on the last phoneme (/bagar/-/bagaj/). In contrast, a facilitatory priming effect was observed when the primes mismatched the targets on the medial phoneme (/viraj/-/vilaj/).

Manulex-infra: distributional characteristics of grapheme-phoneme mappings, and infralexical and lexical units in child-directed written material.

It is well known that the statistical characteristics of a language, such as word frequency or the consistency of the relationships between orthography and phonology, influence literacy acquisition. Accordingly, linguistic databases play a central role by compiling quantitative and objective estimates about the principal variables that affect reading and writing acquisition. We describe a new set ofWeb-accessible databases of French orthography whose main characteristic is that they are based on frequency analyses of words occurring in reading books used in the elementary school grades.

Letter-by-letter processing in the phonological conversion of multiletter graphemes: searching for sounds in printed pseudowords.

Current models of word reading differ in their descriptions of how print-to-sound conversion is performed. Whereas a parallel procedure is generally assumed, the dual-route cascaded model developed by Coltheart and colleagues (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, and Ziegler, 2001) holds that the nonlexical conversion operates letter by letter, serially from left to right. An interesting aspect of the hypothesized serial procedure is that only the first letter of two-letter graphemes is thought to cause activation of its corresponding phonological code, the second letter of multiletter graphemes being directly merged with the preceding letter to form a complex grapheme.

Musical structure modulates semantic priming in vocal music.

It has been shown that harmonic structure may influence the processing of phonemes whatever the extent of participants' musical expertise [Bigand, E., Tillmann, B., Poulin, B.

Learning nonadjacent dependencies: no need for algebraic-like computations.

Is it possible to learn the relation between 2 nonadjacent events? M. Pena, L. L.

Lexical competition in phonological priming: assessing the role of phonological match and mismatch lengths between primes and targets.

In five experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments 1A and 1B replicate and extend Slowiaczek and Hamburger's (1992) observation that inhibitory effects occur when the prime and the target share the first three phonemes (e.g.

Inhibitory priming effects in auditory word recognition: when the target's competitors conflict with the prime word.

Several studies indicate that the number of similar sounding words that are activated during recognition is a powerful predictor of performance on auditory targets. Words with few competitors are processed more quickly and accurately than words with many competitors. In the present study, we examined the contribution of the competitor set size in determining the magnitude of the inhibitory priming effect.

A new set of 299 pictures for psycholinguistic studies: French norms for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, age of acquisition, and naming latencies.

Pictures are often used as stimuli in studies of perception, language, and memory. Since performances on different sets of pictures are generally contrasted, stimulus selection requires the use of standardized material to match pictures across different variables. Unfortunately, the number of standardized pictures available for empirical research is rather limited.