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To evaluate the orthographic and phonological processing skills of developmental dyslexics, we (a) examined their abilities to exploit properties of orthographic redundancy and (b) tested whether their phonological deficit extends to spelling-to-sound connections for large-grain size units such as syllables. To assess the processing skills in dyslexics, we utilized the illusory conjunction paradigm to investigate the nature of reading units in French dyslexic and control children matched in reading age. In control children, reading units were defined by both orthographic redundancy and phonological syllable information. In dyslexics, however, reading units were defined only by orthographic redundancy. Therefore, despite their impairment in reading acquisition, developmental dyslexics have the ability to encode and exploit letter frequency co-occurrences. In contrast, their access to phonological syllables from letters was impaired, suggesting that their phonological deficit extends to large grain-size phonological units.

The present research aimed to investigate whether, as previously observed with pictures, background auditory rhythm would also influence visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, participants were presented with bisyllabic visual words, segmented into two successive groups of letters, while an irrelevant strongly metric auditory sequence was played in a loop. The first group of letters could either be congruent with the syllabic division of the word (e.g. val in val/se) or not (e.g. va in va/lse). In agreement with the Dynamic Attending Theory (DAT), our results confirmed that the presentation of the correct first syllable "on-beat" (i.e. in synchrony with a peak of covert attention) facilitated visual word recognition compared to when it was presented "off-beat". However, when an incongruent first syllable was displayed "on-beat", this led to an aggravation of impaired recognition. Thus, our results suggest that oscillatory attention tapped into cognitive processes rather than perceptual or decisional and motor stages. We like to think of our paradigm, which combines background auditory rhythm with segmented visual stimuli, as a sort of temporal magnifying glass which allows for the enlargement of the reaction time differences between beneficial and detrimental processing conditions in human cognition. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

The present study investigated whether the balance of neighborhood distribution (i.e., the way orthographic neighbors are spread across letter positions) influences visual word recognition. Three word conditions were compared. Word neighbors were either concentrated on one letter position (e.g.,nasse/basse-lasse-tasse-masse) or were unequally spread across two letter positions (e.g.,pelle/celle-selle-telle-perle), or were equally spread across two letter positions (e.g.,litre/titre-vitre-libre-livre). Predictions based on the interactive activation model [McClelland & Rumelhart (1981). Psychological Review, 88, 375-401] were generated by running simulations and were confirmed in the lexical decision task. Data showed that words were more rapidly identified when they had spread neighbors rather than concentrated neighbors. Furthermore, within the set of spread neighbors, words were more rapidly recognized when they had equally rather than unequally spread neighbors. The findings are explained in terms of activation and inhibition processes in the interactive activation framework.

The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically feminine, or neutral. Two response conditions were used. In the "determiner" condition, children indicated the gender class by orally providing the determiner "un" or "une" marked for gender. In the "picture" condition, responses were given by pointing to the picture of a Martian-like female or male person that would be best called by each spoken pseudoword. Results indicated that as young as 3 years, children associated the determiner corresponding to the ending bias at greater than chance levels. Ending-consistent performance increased from 3 to 9 years of age. Moreover, from 4 years of age onward, sensitivity to endings affected categorization. Starting at that age, pictures were selected according to endings at greater than chance levels. This effect also increased with age. The discussion deals with the mechanisms of language acquisition and the relation between language and cognition.

Details a study on 10 French native speaking Williams syndrome (WS) individuals in which gender agreement and assignment were assessed through gender categorization and gender concord. Concludes WS people were not impaired in gender agreement which in the French language relies on syntactic rules or on the extraction of regularities, but experienced difficulties in retrieving lexical instances. (PM)

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 FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this study was to test if apprentice readers (6-7 to 7-8 years old) and beginner readers (8-9 to 10-11 years old) perceive syllabic units in written words. The paradigm of illusory conjunctions was used because it can determine the infra-lexical units identified at the first steps of the written stimuli process. Two experiments were conducted on children from the first (6-7 years old) to the last years (10-11 years old) of the learning-to-read process. Results have shown that children perceive syllables in letter sequences as soon as the end of the first year of the learning-to-read process. The perception of these units is the result of two information sources: the syllabic phonology and the orthographic redundancy. The syllable could then be a pertinent unit in the learning--to-read process. Resume L'objectif de cette recherche etait de tester si les apprentis lecteurs (6-7 a 7-8 ans) et les lecteurs debutants (8-9 a 10-11 ans) percoivent les unites syllabiques dans les mots ecrits. Le paradigme des conjonctions illusoires a ete utilise parce qu'il permet de determiner les unites infralexicales identifiees dans les premieres etapes de traitement des stimuli ecrits. Deux experiences ont ete conduites chez les enfants de la premiere (6-7 ans) a la derniere annee d'acquisition de la lecture (10-11 ans). Les resultats ont montre que les enfants percoivent les syllabes dans des suites de lettres des la fin de la premiere annee d'apprentissage de la lecture. La perception de ces unites resulte de deux sources d'informations : l'information phonologique syllabique et l'information liee a la redondance orthographique. La syllabe pourrait alors etre une unite pertinente dans l'apprentissage de la lecture.

The neighbourhood frequency effect was investigated by a letter-case manipulation of French words presented in the go/no-go lexical decision task. Accented words were presented both in lower-case letters with written accents and upper-case letters with no written accents, two usual typographies in French. This procedure addressed the stimulus-matching problem by using intraword comparisons as some words have different orthographic neighbourhoods in the two cases. Neighbourhood frequency was varied across case change for half of the words while it was held constant for the other half. The results showed an interaction between letter-case and neighbourhood constancy, so the inhibitory neighbourhood frequency effect could not be attributed to interstimulus comparisons or to typographical change. Implications are discussed in current models of visual word recognition.

Lexical-decision tasks were used to test the role of neighborhood distribution in visual word recognition. Predictions based on the interactive activation model were generated by running simulations. The data were compared for words with 2 higher frequency neighbors that differed in their neighborhood distribution. The neighbors were 'single' when they did not share a neighborhood relationship (e.g., neighbors of flanc: franc-blanc) or 'twin' when they shared a neighborhood relationship (e.g., neighbors of firme: ferme-forme). Results show a facilitatory neighborhood distribution effect on words in Experiments 1 (easy pseudowords) and 3 (difficult pseudowords and easy pseudowords) and on pseudowords in Experiment 2. These data can be accounted for in terms of lexical inhibition in the interactive activation framework.

Self-biases are well described in adults but remain poorly understood in children. Here, we investigated in 6-10 year-old children (N = 132) the self-prioritization effect (SPE), a self-bias which reflects, in adults, the perceptual advantage for stimuli arbitrarily associated with the self as compared to those associated with other persons. We designed a child-friendly adaptation of a paradigm originally introduced in adults by Sui, He, and Humphreys (2012) in order to test whether the SPE also occurs in children and if so, to determine its evolution with age. A robust SPE was obtained from the age of 6, and this effect was similar-sized in our four age groups. These findings are discussed with reference to the development of the self during childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that activating the elderly stereotype alters the performance in several tasks. However, recent difficulties in both replicating and interpreting these results have led to strong criticism among scholars. Here, we report the results of two experiments in which participants were first primed with one stereotype (elderly, young, or control), then they performed a lexical decision task (LDT). We used the Diffusion Model to distinguish between mechanisms that could be altered by priming. Unexpectedly, participants primed with the young stereotype responded faster than participants belonging to both control and elderly primed groups. Moreover, a Diffusion Model analysis allowed us to conclude that participants primed young did not change their response speed per se, but used a less cautious decision criterion. Implications for elderly stereotype priming are discussed since our results question not only the direction of the effect commonly observed but also the interpretation of the processes underlying elderly stereotype priming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely agreed that learning to read starts with the establishment of letter-to-phoneme correspondences. However, it is also widely agreed that prereaders do not have access to phoneme units. Here we show that the building of associations between letters and syllables, which we call the ‘syllabic bridge’, might be a faster and more direct way of learning spelling-to-sound correspondences in French. After a few minutes of exposure, prereaders are able to learn the statistical properties of letter co-occurrences. Statistical learning is boosted by explicit instructions about the associations between letter clusters and syllables. Building the syllabic bridge from available phonological syllables and frequent letter clusters may therefore be the first step in learning to read. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The respective influence of orthographic redundancy (Seidenberg, 1987) and syllable boundaries (Rapp, 1992) on reading units in French was tested in three experiments, using the illusory conjunction paradigm (Prinzmetal, Treiman, &#38>; Rho, 1986). Bigram boundaries were defined according to bigram frequencies. The data showed that the syllable effect was attenuated or cancelled when syllable boundaries did not coincide with bigram boundaries. Reading units were defined by syllable and orthographic information. The implications of such findings for the dual route theory and the PDP model are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical decision tasks (LDTs) were used with a masked priming procedure to test whether neighbourhood distribution interacts with orthographic priming. Word targets had either 'single' neighbours when their two higher frequency orthographic neighbours were spread over letter positions (e.g., neighbours of LOBE : robe-loge ) or 'twin' neighbours when they were concentrated on a single letter position (e.g., neighbours of FARD : lard-tard ). All word targets were preceded by their highest frequency orthographic neighbour or by a control prime. An inhibitory priming effect was found for words with single neighbours, but not for words with twin neighbours, in both a yes/no LDT (Experiment 1a) and a go/no-go LDT (Experiment 1b). This interaction was replicated in a go/no-go LDT when the position of the letter yielding the neighbour prime was controlled (Experiment 2). Simulations run on the word materials revealed that the interactive activation model captures the inhibitory priming effect in the single-neighbour condition but fails to capture the loss of priming in the twin-neighbour condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted in French with sentences of the form ''N V N1of-N2 who . . . '' Example: ''A journalist approachedthe barrister (male) of the singer (female) who seemed more confident (masculine or feminine gender) than (s)he ought to be.'' The results are consistentwiththose 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four experiments were carried out to investigate the use of a new paradigm to study word recognition in reading. A new version of self-paced reading (APS 2) makes the distinction between word display time (pressing time = PT) and the blank screen (releasing time = RT). Each time represents a particular processing stage: PT represents lexical identification, and RT represents the use of lexical information. The two stages differentiate pre- and post-lexical processes, respectively. Word frequency is manipulated to affect the two predefined stages of processing. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 showed that (1) frequency affects target PT and RT, and post-target RT when subjects read texts, and (2) the frequency effect was observed only with target PT when subjects read the same words in word-list context. Descriptive analyses showed that the observed effect on target PT in fact depended upon the subjects' reading strategies and perceptual constraints. This result was replicated in Experiment 4, in which a frequency post-effect was observed. Finally, a general framework is proposed to clarify the control of hand movements in APS 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]