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This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Comprehension syntaxico-semantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level in the written but not in the spoken modality, compared to reading age-matched children, suggesting a difficulty in handling syntax while reading. In the second task, syntactic processing was further explored through a test of relative clause processing, in which inflectional markers could aid in attributing roles to the elements in a complex syntactic structure. Children with dyslexia were insensitive to inflectional markers in both reading and listening, as was the reading age control group, while only the older normal reader group appeared to make use of the inflectional markers. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that difficulties in comprehension in dyslexia are strongly related to poor reading skills. (Contains 4 tables.)

Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as "chat-ure" ("cat-ish") composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real derivational suffix (e.g., "chot-ure") or a pseudostem and a pseudosuffix (e.g., "chot-ore"). More, the chot-ure items were read faster and more accurately than the chot-ore items. These results suggest that beginning French readers are able to use morphological units (both stems and derivational suffixes) to decode new words. The second experiment compared the impact of display format on reading time. Suffixed words were presented in four segmentation formats: syllabic ("ma lade"), morphological ("mal ade"), morphological + 1 grapheme ("mala de"), or unsegmented ("malade"). For both groups of readers, the morphological + 1 condition generated the longest reading times but there was no difference between the other three conditions. It was concluded that syllables, morphemes, and whole word forms contribute to a similar extent to word reading for low-frequency words. Morphological processing may therefore be used early by French children to identify both new words and low-frequency words.

This study investigated the reading and reading-related skills of 15 French-speaking adults with dyslexia, whose performance was compared with that of chronological-age controls (CA) and reading-level controls (RL). Experiment 1 assessed the efficiency of their phonological reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term memory, and rapid automatic naming (RAN)) and experiment 2 assessed the efficiency of their lexical and sublexical (or phonological) reading procedures (reading aloud of pseudowords and irregular words of different lengths). Experiment 1 revealed that adults with dyslexia exhibited lower phonological reading-related skills than CAs only, and were better than RL controls on the RAN. In experiment 2, as compared with RL controls, only a deficit in the sublexical reading procedure was observed. The results of the second experiment replicated observations from English-language studies but not those of the first experiment. Several hypotheses are discussed to account for these results, including one related to the transparency of orthographic systems.

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Compréhension syntaxico-sémantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop’s test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level in the written but not in the spoken modality, compared to reading age–matched children, suggesting a difficulty in handling syntax while reading. In the second task, syntactic processing was further explored through a test of relative clause processing, in which inflectional markers could aid in attributing roles to the elements in a complex syntactic structure. Children with dyslexia were insensitive to inflectional markers in both reading and listening, as was the reading age control group, while only the older normal reader group appeared to make use of the inflectional markers. Overall, the results support the hypothesis that difficulties in comprehension in dyslexia are strongly related to poor reading skills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as chat-ure (cat-ish) composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real derivational suffix (e.g., chot-ure) or a pseudostem and a pseudosuffix (e.g., chot-ore). More, the chot-ure items were read faster and more accurately than the chot-ore items. These results suggest that beginning French readers are able to use morphological units (both stems and derivational suffixes) to decode new words. The second experiment compared the impact of display format on reading time. Suffixed words were presented in four segmentation formats: syllabic (ma lade), morphological (mal ade), morphological + 1 grapheme (mala de), or unsegmented (malade). For both groups of readers, the morphological + 1 condition generated the longest reading times but there was no difference between the other three conditions. It was concluded that syllables, morphemes, and whole word forms contribute to a similar extent to word reading for low-frequency words. Morphological processing may therefore be used early by French children to identify both new words and low-frequency words. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]