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In this commentary, we argue the importance of the period before learning the alphabetic code and develop a new theoretical framework for the cognitive processes involved at the very beginning of learning to read. According to our theory, prereaders begin to learn to read by associating letter clusters with concrete phonological units such as syllables, a process we refer to as “building the syllabic bridge” (Doignon‐Camus & Zagar, 2014). This procedure may trigger statistical learning to extract regularities of grapheme–phoneme correspondences. We assume that statistical learning facilitates access to phonemic awareness and then the acquisition of the alphabetic code. Our arguments are partly based on the comparison between the studies conducted by Vazeux et al. (2020) and Sargiani et al. (2022), whose results might have seemed contradictory at first sight. Finally, we suggest pedagogical implications and some perspectives for future research. In this commentary, we argue the importance of the period before learning the alphabetic code and develop a new theoretical framework for the cognitive processes involved at the very beginning of learning to read. According to our theory, prereaders begin to learn to read by associating letter clusters with concrete phonological units such as syllables, a process we refer to as “building the syllabic bridge” (Doignon‐Camus & Zagar, 2014).

Abstract.This study measured the effect of emotional states on lexical decision task performance and investigated which underlying components (physiological, attentional orienting, executive, lexical, and/or strategic) are affected. We did this by assessing participants’ performance on a lexical decision task, which they completed before and after an emotional state induction task. The sequence effect, usually produced when participants repeat a task, was significantly smaller in participants who had received one of the three emotion inductions (happiness, sadness, embarrassment) than in control group participants (neutral induction). Using the diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) to resolve the data into meaningful parameters that correspond to specific psychological components, we found that emotion induction only modulated the parameter reflecting the physiological and/or attentional orienting components, whereas the executive, lexical, and strategic components were not altered. These results suggest that emotional states have an impact on the low-level mechanisms underlying mental chronometric tasks.

In a recent article, Kwon, Nam, and Lee (2015) did not replicate the influence of syllable orthographic frequency on the inhibitory syllable frequency effect. Two reasons can account for this result. First, parsing syllables is not difficult in Hangul. Second, the pronunciation of the first syllable of the word stimulus was likely ambiguous.

Mathey, Zagar, Doignon, and Seigneuric (2006) reported an inhibitory effect of syllabic neighbourhood in monosyllabic French words suggesting that syllable units mediate the access to lexical representations of monosyllabic stimuli. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the perception of syllable units in monosyllabic stimuli. The illusory conjunction paradigm was used to examine perceptual groupings of letters. Experiment 1 showed that potential syllables in monosyllabic French words (e.g., BIin BICHE) affected the pattern of illusory conjunctions. Experiment 2 indicated that the perceptual parsing in monosyllabic items was due to syllable information and orthographic redundancy. The implications of the data are discussed for visual word recognition processes in an interactive activation model incorporating syllable units and connected adjacent letters (IAS; Mathey et al., 2006).

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in French with sentences of the form “N V N1of-N2 who …” Example: “A journalist approached the barrister (male) of the singer (female) who seemed more confident (masculine or feminine gender) than (s)he ought to be.”The results are consistent with those of Cuetos and Mitchell (1988). French readers, like Spanish readers, prefer early closure (and are garden-pathed when the sentence turns out to be a late-closure attachment). This effect was exhibited by first-pass reading times that are usually assumed to reflect initial syntactic commitments. These results are discussed in relation to Frazier and Clifton's recent proposals concerning attachment mechanisms in the case of “non-primary” relationships such as relative clauses, and more precisely the notion that early-closure attachments observed in cross-linguistic studies are determined by relatively late processes.

Recent studies have reported that the oscillations of auditory attention entrained by a background rhythmic sequence can influence performance in visual recognition tasks. We have designed an experimental paradigm in which a visual item (either a bisyllabic word or a familiar face) is displayed on screen in two consecutive parts while a musical rhythm is played in the background. Depending on the timing conditions, the first or the second part of the item could be presented either in-synchrony or out-of-synchrony with the beats of the auditory rhythm. In a first series of experiments, participants performed a lexical decision task on bisyllabic 5-letter strings. Results show that when the correct first syllable of a visual word (e.g., panin pan.da)is presented on-beat, recognition is significantly enhanced compared to an off-beat presentation. However, if an incongruent first syllable (e.g., pain pan.da) is presented on-beat, word recognition is highly impaired. This kind of interaction between the syllabic segmentation and rhythmic synchrony was not observed for the second part of the word. In this case, synchrony only had a positive main effect on word recognition. Overall, these results show that cross-modal temporal expectations not only affect perceptual or motor levels of processing stages but also impact more central stages of word recognition such as the processing of the first syllable. In a second series of experiments (still under way), we wanted to confirm these results using different visual materials. Here, participants had to report if the upper part of a face (containing the eyes) belonged to a familiar person or not, whether the lower part (containing the mouth) was congruent or not with the person to be recognized. Preliminary results show that the recognition of faces that are segmented in time could also be influenced by the oscillations of auditory rhythmic attention.