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International audience; Several dictionary websites are available on the web to access semantic, synonymous, or spelling information about a given word. During nine years, we systematically recorded all the entered letter sequences from a French web dictionary. A total of 200 million ortho-graphic forms were obtained allowing us to create a large-scale database of spelling errors that could inform psychological theories about spelling processes. To check the reliability of this big data methodology, we selected from this database a sample of 100 frequently misspelled words. A group of 100 French university students had to perform a spelling-to-dictation test on this list of words. The results showed a strong correlation between the two data sets on the frequencies of produced spellings (r = 0.82). Although the distributions of spelling errors were relatively consistent across the two databases, the proportion of correct responses revealed significant differences. Regression analyses allowed us to generate possible explanations for these differences in terms of task-dependent factors. We argue that comparing the results of these large-scale databases with those of standard and controlled experimental paradigms is certainly a good way to determine the conditions under which this big data methodology can be adequately used for informing psychological theories.

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Executive functions (EFs; working memory [WM], inhibition, and shifting) are widely known to play a critical role in school achievement. Among these EFs, WM appears to be implicated in numeracy and literacy. The contribution of inhibition and shifting to school achievement is less clear. Given the existing divergences in the literature and the importance of the interindividual differences in these domains, it seems important to assess EFs and scholastic skills in the same elementary school children. However, studies providing such an assessment are scarce. We explored whether EFs differentially contribute to mathematics, reading, and spelling skills in fourth-grade children (N = 71). The results revealed that (a) WM and inhibition accounted for unique variance in mathematics skills, (b) WM and shifting accounted for unique variance in reading skills, and (c) only shifting accounted for unique variance in spelling skills. The implications of these findings for children and teachers are discussed.

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. The other nonword was in either a morphological condition (for children in the morphological group) or an orthographic condition (for children in the orthographic group). In the morphological condition, the final spelling of the target nonword was justified by two morphologically related nonwords. For example, coirardage, obtained by adding the suffix age to coirard, designates the coirard’s song and justifies the final silent d of coirard. The orthographic condition included two nonwords that were orthographically but not morphologically related to the target. For example, the coirard’s song was coirardume, obtained by adding ume, which is not a suffix, to coirard. Then, 30 min after reading the stories, children were asked to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g., coirard, coirars, coirar). In the morphological group, both third and fifth graders more often selected the correct spellings for items presented in the morphological condition than for items presented in the opaque condition. In the orthographic group, the results were very similar in the opaque and orthographic conditions. The findings show that the benefit of morphological relatedness in the implicit learning of new spellings cannot be reduced to orthographic relatedness.

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We present a review of the research on English and French children's learning of the place of morphemes in spelling. Traditional models suggest that children use morphology relatively late in their spelling careers and that the end-point of development lies in rule-based performance. In contrast, we show that (a) children are sensitive to the role of morphemes in determining spelling at a young age and (b) they do not rely (at least exclusively) on rules. We discuss the features that may account for discrepancies between studies demonstrating late versus early use of morphology and we examine the processes that children might rely on in their learning, specifically statistical learning of intra- and inter-word regularities and retrieval of item-specific representations. This proposal provides a potential explanation for how children learn about the representation of morphology in print.

We put forward our view on how children learn to spell through a review of recent research on English and French children's spelling development. We examine children's learning of graphotactic conventions (legal combinations of letters), followed by a more in-depth treatment of how children learn the place of morphemes (smallest units of meaning in language) in spelling. We contrast findings from recent research with those of traditional models that suggest that children use both graphotactic and morphological information relatively late in their spelling careers and that the end-point of development, particularly for morphological conventions, lies in rule-based performance. Instead, it seems that quite young children's spellings are influenced by both graphotactic and morphological patterns and that writers do not rely (at least exclusively) on rules. We consider the possibility that children might use statistical learning to gain knowledge of both graphotactic and morphological features of the orthography. Keywords: morphology, spelling acquisition, orthographic learning, spelling development The English and French orthographies adhere to several types of regularities: specifically, phonological, graphotactic, and morphological. In this article, we put forward our view on how children's spellings are influenced by these consistencies, with a special focus on learning of graphotactic and morphological regularities. Our approach draws on the statistical learning perspective, in which it is important to consider the regularities in the (written) input on which children could rely. Accordingly, we begin by considering the kind of information represented in the English and French orthographies. French and English, like most alphabetic orthographies, rely in part on the regular connections between letters and sounds to generate word spellings. This is the case for the words cat and non ("no"). And yet this phonological basis does not explain the variability with which sounds are represented across different words. For example, the /eI/ sound can be spelled with -ay, -ey, -eigh, -a, and -ea at the ends of words in English and with -ez, -ai, -e, -ef, -ee, and -aie at the end of words in French. A second source of information useful to spelling comes from graphotactic regularities about the legal combinations of letters.' In French, words cannot end in a consonant doublet on its own (e.g., pomme, but not *pomm_ for the word apple in French), but they can in English. In English it is extremely unusual for words to start with consonant doublets (e.g., full, but not *fful), and such patterns never occur in French. These graphotactic patterns determine, in part, the specific letters that make up the spellings of words in both English and French. A third level of consistency in spelling comes from the smallest units of meaning in language, or morphemes. The use of morphological information determines the choice between several plausible representations of a given sound. The decision between the many different spellings of/e/ (as in bed, head, and said) is simple for some words when morphology is considered (e.g., ea in health driven by the root heal). Similarly, the sound /et/ has many different spellings in French (e.g., -aite, -ete or -ete), but a word ending in a diminutive suffix is always spelled -ette (as in fillette, little girl). Morphology even sometimes overrides the phonological basis of spelling. English regular past tense verbs end in the letters -ed, despite the pronunciation of these letters as either /t/, /d/ or /Id/ (as in walked, warned, and spotted). Similarly, in French the letters -ai are used for the sound 3 in faiseur (/fazr/, producer) to preserve the spelling of the root (faire /fer/, to do), despite the fact that e is the typical spelling of this sound. In the above examples, morphology could be useful, but success in spelling could also be achieved through word-specific memorization. …

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., guprane); AAB, with a doublet before a single consonant, which is legitimate in French (e.g., gupprane); and ABB, with a doublet after a single consonant, which is illegitimate (e.g., guprrane). In Experiment 1, the nonwords were embedded within texts that participants read for meaning. In Experiment 2, participants read the nonwords in isolation, with or without instruction to memorize their spellings; they copied the nonwords in Experiment 3. In all of these conditions, AB and AAB spellings were learned more readily than ABB spellings. Although participants were highly knowledgeable about the illegitimacy of ABB spellings, the orthographic distinctiveness of these spellings did not make them easier to recall than legitimate spellings. When recalling ABB spellings, participants sometimes made transposition errors, doubling the wrong consonant of a cluster (e.g., spelling gupprane instead of guprrane). Participants almost never transposed the doubling for AAB items. Transposition errors, biased in the direction of replacing illegitimate with legitimate orthographic patterns, show that graphotactic knowledge influences memory for specific items. An analysis of the spellings produced in the copy phase and final recall test of Experiment 3 further suggests that transposition errors resulted not so much from reconstructive processes at the time of recall but from reconstructive processes or inefficient encoding at earlier points.

La mise en œuvre de connaissances phonographemiques est fondamentale mais souvent insuffisante pour produire des orthographes correctes en francais. D’autres connaissances doivent etre acquises et mobilisees, qu’elles soient apprises par enseignement explicite ou non : des connaissances orthographiques, relatives a l’orthographe de mots specifiques (orthographe lexicale), a des regularites du systeme orthographique (regularites graphotactiques) ou a des connaissances sur les morphemes (les unites minimales de sens) constituant les mots. Cet article presente des recherches visant a preciser quand et comment les enfants acquierent et mobilisent ces differentes connaissances pour produire des orthographes.

This article aims at showing that in learning and using the agreement of the French past participle (e.g., mange (eaten), people rely on the same processes as those previously described as concern the number agreement of nouns, adjectives, and verbs (Fayol, Thevenin, Totereau & Jarousse, 1999). Firstly, errors encountered on the past participles employed with have (instead of be or as adjectives) are due to the generalisation of the agreement procedure previously learned with adjectives and with the copule be (e.g., ils ont manges). Secondly, adults have better performances when dealing with the infinitive forms of the verbs which have less frequent past participle homophones than when dealing with other kinds of verbs (i.e., verbs without homophones or verbs having more frequent homophonous past participles), but only when those verbs are included in sentences determining the use of the infinitive mode. This result suggests that adults sometimes retrieve directly from memory inflected forms rather than applying an agreement procedure.

In an associative recognition task, distractors generally consist of a rearrangement of the items composing the study pairs. This makes it possible that processing the distractors generates retroactive interference on memory for the study pairs. In Experiment 1, we explored this possibility in a yes/no recognition test concerning previously learned arbitrary associations between visual symbols and auditory syllables. Rearranged pairs had a deleterious impact on the accuracy and the speed of responses to related correct pairs. This effect did not vary as a function of the number of training blocks, and furthermore, in Experiment 2, the same effect was observed for overlearned small multiplication facts. These results suggest that exposure to potentially confounding information generates interference even if this information is known to be incorrect. Some implications are outlined, especially with regard to the widespread use of multiple-choice tests in knowledge evaluation.

In French, the transcription of the same sound can be guided by both probabilistic graphotactic constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is more often transcribed ette after -v than after -f) and morphological constraints (e.g., /epsilon t/ is always transcribed ette when used as a diminutive suffix). Three experiments showed that pseudo-word spellings of 8-to 11-year-old children and adults were influenced by both types of constraints. The influence of graphotactic regularities persisted when reliance on morphological rules was possible, without any falling off as a function of age. This suggests that rules are not abstracted, even after massive amounts of exposure to a rule-based material. These results can be accounted for by a statistical model of implicit learning.

This study examined how French third (36) and fifth (36) graders used the morphosyntactic context when they spell morphologically complex words with homophonous suffixes (/a/). Participants had to spell adverbs (/a/ transcribed ent) and present participles (/a/ transcribed ant), contrasted on the basis of their frequency, in isolation or embedded within a sentence. Spelling performances were better when the words were dictated in the context of a sentence than in a condition of isolated word dictation. This was the case even in Grade 3, despite the fact that explicit teaching about the transcription of the suffixes /a/ had been provided only to the fifth graders. The frequency of target words was an important determinant of spelling success even when a sentence context was provided. Thus, even though children benefited from the morphosyntactic information provided by the sentence, they did not rely (systematically) on a morphological rule such as "words ending with /a/ are always given the ant spelling af...

Pacton and Perruchet (2008) reported that participants who were asked to process adjacent elements located within a sequence of digits learned adjacent dependencies but did not learn nonadjacent dependencies and conversely, participants who were asked to process nonadjacent digits learned nonadjacent dependencies but did not learn adjacent dependencies. In the present study, we showed that when participants were simply asked to read aloud the same sequences of digits, a task demand that did not require the intentional processing of specific elements as in standard statistical learning tasks, only adjacent dependencies were learned. The very same pattern was observed when digits were replaced by syllables. These results show that the perfect symmetry found in Pacton and Perruchet was not due to the fact that the processing of digits is less sensitive to their distance than the processing of syllables, tones, or visual shapes used in most statistical learning tasks. Moreover, the present results, completed with a reanalysis of the data collected in Pacton and Perruchet (2008), demonstrate that participants are highly sensitive to violations involving the spacing between paired elements. Overall, these results are consistent with the Pacton and Perruchet's single-process account of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies, in which the joint attentional processing of the two events is a necessary and sufficient condition for learning the relation between them, irrespective of their distance. However, this account should be completed to encompass the notion that the presence or absence of an intermediate event is an intrinsic component of the representation of an association.

International audience; Adults often learn to spell words during the course of reading for meaning, without intending to do so. We used an incidental learning task in order to study this process. Spellings that contained double n, r and t which are common doublets in French, were learned more readily by French university students than spellings that contained less common but still legal doublets. When recalling or recognizing the latter, the students sometimes made transposition errors, doubling a consonant that often doubles in French rather than the consonant that was originally doubled (e.g., tiddunar recalled as tidunnar). The results, found in three experiments using different nonwords and different types of instructions, show that people use general knowledge about the graphotactic patterns of their writing system together with word-specific knowledge to reconstruct spellings that they learn from reading. These processes contribute to failures and successes in memory for spellings, as in other domains.

Sébastien Pacton, Michel Fayol, Pierre Perruchet. L'apprentissage de l'orthographe lexicale : le cas des régularités According to traditional stage models of spelling development, children are thought to isolate the phonemes in the word and attempt to spell each with an appropriate grapheme without regard for acceptable letter sequences or other conventions of specific orthographies. In this paper, using nonwords in both judgment and production tasks, we show that French children (Grades 1 to 5) are sensitive to some orthographic patterns having no phonological counterparts (the use of double consonants and the transcription of /o/) much earlier than traditional stage models posit., Pacton Sébastien, Fayol Michel, Perruchet Pierre. L'apprentissage de l'orthographe lexicale : le cas des régularités. In: Langue française, n°124, 1999. L'orthographe et ses scripteurs, sous la direction de Jean-Pierre Chevrot. pp. 23-39.

Transcrîbing complex graphonemes in French. The example of /o/. Sébastien PACTON, Université de Dijon-LEAD CNRS, Michel FAYOL, Université de Clermont Ferrand-LAPSCO CNRS. In French, a same phoneme can be transcribed by several graphemes (o, au, eau for /o/). The probability of finding a given grapheme varies according to the position (start-middle-end) of the phoneme in the word as well as to the other letters on either side of it (consonant preceeding or following the phoneme /o/). The fact that eau never appears at the start of a word can be explained by the way of a rule. On the other hand, the regularities relative to the distribution of o and au according to the letters on either side of them are only probabilistic, which renders any rule - and exercise - based teaching impossible. The children must assimilate these regularities through implicit learning. The objective of this present piece of research was to study, by mearis of a task requiring pairs of non-words (opécile-eaupécile) to be identified, whether when and by using what indications primary school children become aware of the distribution of différent graphemes (o, au, eau) for which no phonological opposition exists. As early as the end of 1st year infant school, indications relative to the distribution of graphemes according to their position in the word are picked out and used in class (eau never found at the start of a word). In contrast, the pupils' judgements are only influenced by the relative frequency of the graphemes o and au according to the consonants which precede or follow the phoneme /o/ from 4th year infant school onwards., En français, un même phonème peut être transcrit par plusieurs graphèmes (o, au, eau pour loi). La probabilité de trouver un graphème donné varie en fonction de la position (début -milieu -fin) du phonème dans le mot et de son environnement immédiat (consonne précédant ou suivant loi). Le fait que eau n'apparait jamais en début de mot peut être décrit sous la forme d'une règle. En revanche, les régularités relatives à la distribution de o et au en fonction de l'environnement immédiat sont de type probabiliste, ce qui rend un enseigne¬ ment à base de règles et d'exercices impossible. Les enfants doivent les acquérir par apprentissage implicite. L'objectif de la présente recherche était d'étudier au moyen d'une tâche de jugement de paires de non-mots (e.g. opécile-eaupécile) si, quand et à partir de quels indices des enfants d'école primaire deviennent sensibles à la distribution de graphèmes différents (o, au et eau) pour lesquels ils ne disposent pas d'opposition phonologique. Dès la fin du CP, des indices relatifs à la distribution des graphèmes en fonction de la position sont repérés et utilisés (jamais eau en position initiale). Par contraste, les jugements ne sont influencés par la fréquence relative des graphèmes o et au en fonction des consonnes précédant ou suivant loi qu'à partir du CM1., Pacton Sébastien, Fayol Michel. La transcription de graphonèmes complexes en français. L'exemple de /O/. In: Repères, recherches en didactique du français langue maternelle, n°18, 1998. À la conquête de l'écrit, sous la direction de Mireille Brigaudiot et Roland Goigoux. pp. 163-171.

International audience; Use of morphologically related words often helps in selecting among spellings of sounds in French. For instance, final /wa/ may be spelled oi (e.g., envoi “sendoff”), oit (e.g., exploit “exploit”), ois (e.g., siamois, “siamese”), or oie (e.g., joie “joy”). The morphologically complex word exploiter “to exploit”, with a pronounced t, can be used to indicate that the stem exploit is spelled with a silent t. We asked whether 8-year-old children benefited from such cues to learn new spellings. Children read silently stories which included two target nonwords, one presented in an opaque condition and the other in a morphological condition. In the opaque condition, the sentence provided semantic information (e.g., a vensois is a musical instrument) but no morphological information that could justify the spelling of the target word's final sound. Such justification was available in the morphological condition (e.g., the vensoisist plays the vensois instrument, which justifies that vensois includes a final silent s). 30 min after having read the stories, children's orthographic learning was assessed by asking them to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (e.g., vensois, vensoit, vensoie). Children chose correct spellings more often in the morphological condition than the opaque condition, even though the root (vensois) had been presented equally often in both conditions. That is, children benefited from information about the spelling of the morphologically complex word to learn the spelling of the stem.

International audience; Nonadjacent dependencies are present whenevera relation exists between two events, A and C,irrespective of the intervening events. This structure isoften referred to as AXC, where X stands for a variableevent that is statistically independent from both A andC. An example of nonadjacent dependencies is therelationship between auxiliaries and inflectionalmorphemes, as in “is writing” in English, which occursirrespective of the verb stem. The mastery of this kindof structure in the language area has been endowedwith major theoretical implications in a Chomskyanperspective, and as a consequence, most research hasbeen carried out in the language domain. However, it isworth pointing out that capturing the relationshipsbetween distant events is essential in many othersituations. As claimed by Turk-Browne et al. (2005),“people are constantly bombarded with noise in spaceand time that needs to be segregated in order to extracta coherent representation of the world, and peoplerarely encounter a sequence of relevant stimuli withoutany interruptions” (p. 562).

This study examined the relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. We show that French children in Grades 3 and 4 appear to use morphological information in spelling; spelling of sounds for which there are several alternatives was more accurate in derived than in nonderived words. The link between morphological awareness and spelling seems to be general, given that morphological awareness correlated with multiple spelling scores, including those that did not involve morphology. Further, the relationship between spelling and morphological awareness seems to be affected by both the developmental level of the child and the phonological structure of the items in the morphological awareness task. We discuss the implications of this research for clarifying the relationship between morphological awareness and spelling.

In this paper, we will discuss the role of different levels of frequency distributions in sentence processing and in written production, looking at French homophones. A comparison of experimental data and corpus statistics will demonstrate that lexical frequencies as well as local and global coherences have to be taken into account to fully explain the empirically established patterns.

International audience; The present chapter focuses on implicit learning processes, and aims at showing that these processes could be used to design new methods of education or reeducation. After a brief definition of what we intend by implicit learning, we will show that these processes operate efficiently in development, from infancy to aging. Then, we will discuss the question of their resistance to neurological or psychiatric diseases. Finally, in a last section, we will comment on their potential use within an applied perspective.

Il est generalement suppose que les operations cognitives auxquelles nous n’avons aucun acces introspectif reposent sur des representations et des formes de raisonnement identiques a celles qui composent la pensee consciente. Cet article presente une vision alternative, dans laquelle il n’y a plus de place pour un « inconscient cognitif ». L’adaptation repose sur la formation de representations conscientes, dont la remarquable organisation emerge naturellement grâce a des processus elementaires d’auto-organisation, par le jeu des interactions dynamiques entre le sujet et son environnement. Quelques pistes de reflexion sont suggerees quant aux enjeux de cette perspective pour l’education.

In 5 experiments, results showed that when participants are faced with materials embedding relations between both adjacent and nonadjacent elements, they learn exclusively the type of relations they had to actively process in order to meet the task demands, irrespective of the spatial contiguity of the paired elements. These results are consonant with current theories positing that attention is a necessary condition for learning. More important, the results provide support for a more radical conception, in which the joint attentional processing of 2 events is also a sufficient condition for learning the relation between them. The well-documented effect of contiguity could be a by-product of the fact that attention generally focuses on contiguous events. This reappraisal considerably extends the scope of approaches based on associative or statistical processes.

The domain-general learning mechanisms elicited in incidental learning situations are of potential interest in many research fields, including language acquisition, object knowledge formation and motor learning. They have been the focus of studies on implicit learning for nearly 40 years. Stemming from a different research tradition, studies on statistical learning carried out in the past 10 years after the seminal studies by Saffran and collaborators, appear to be closely related, and the similarity between the two approaches is strengthened further by their recent evolution. However, implicit learning and statistical learning research favor different interpretations, focusing on the formation of chunks and statistical computations, respectively. We examine these differing approaches and suggest that this divergence opens up a major theoretical challenge for future studies.

The term « implicit learning » designates the process whereby people learn without intent and without being able to articulate clearly what they learn. A growing number of laboratory studies have investigated this form of learning in recent years. This paper focuses on the results that have potential relevance for pedagogical issues. Among the claims that have gained increasing support in the past decade, it has been observed that (1) implicit learning does not lead to abstraction of the rules underlying the studied domain, but instead proceeds through the tuning of processing mechanisms to the distributional properties of the material (2) the attention paid to the material is essential for learning to occur and (3), this form of learning is only moderately dependent on the cognitive abilities of the learner, provided that he or she is able to perform normally the initial task. These statements allow us to specify the power of implicit learning processes, but also their limits. It appears notably that implicit processes fail to detect certain kinds of structure, and are unable to provide even a preliminary draft of formal and communicable knowledge. We provide some guidelines to conceive the possible interactions between implicit learning and explicit instruction. As a case in point, it appears that allowing the possibility of errors during a training program is certainly beneficial for the formation of explicit knowledge about a domain, but could be detrimental for implicit learning.

Des recherches récentes ont montré que la connaissance du nom des lettres joue un rôle influent dans l’acquisition de l’écrit au cours des périodes préscolaire et scolaire. Cette connaissance contribue au développement initial de l’orthographe et de l’identification des mots écrits et elle facilite, par des mécanismes sans doute interdépendants, l’apprentissage des relations lettres-phonèmes et le développement de la sensibilité phonémique. La présente étude s’intéresse aux relations entre la connaissance du nom des lettres et l’apprentissage du son des lettres. Les participantes et les participants étaient des pré-lecteurs francophones scolarisés à deux niveaux préscolaires (4-5 ans et 5-6 ans). Ils ont effectué une tâche d’identification de pseudomots écrits en choix forcé dans laquelle ils devaient identifier, dans une paire de pseudomots différant par une seule consonne (p. ex., BOC vs VOC), le pseudomot prononcé par l’expérimentateur (p. ex., /bok/). Les enfants connaissaient le nom des consonnes utilisées dans l’étude mais ignoraient leur son. Trois variables ont été manipulées : la position de la consonne cible dans le pseudomot (initiale vs finale); le type de nom de la consonne cible (consonne-voyelle vs voyelle-consonne); la structure linguistique des pseudomots (CVC vs CCV). Les résultats ont montré que les enfants pré-lecteurs étaient capables, massivement à 5-6 ans et dans une proportion notable à 4-5 ans, d’utiliser des relations lettres-phonèmes pour distinguer des mots écrits. La discussion envisage des implications théoriques se rapportant à l’apprentissage du son des lettres et esquisse quelques suggestions d’ordre éducatif., Recent research has shown that the knowledge of letter names plays an influential role in writing acquisition skills as children make their way through school. This knowledge contributes to the initial development of spelling skills and the identification of written words, and through mechanisms that are no doubt interdependent; it also helps children learn letter-phoneme relationships and phonemic sensitivity. This study examines the relationships between the knowledge of letter names and learning the sound of each letter. The participants were Francophone pre-readers from two grade levels (4-5 year-olds and 5-6 year-olds). Their task was to identify pseudo words with the forced-choice technique. The students had to identify words the experimenter said (e.g., /bok/) from a pair of pseudo words that only differed by one consonant (e.g., BOC vs. VOC) The children knew the names of the consonants used in the study, but not their sounds. Three variables were manipulated: the position of the target consonant in the pseudo word (initial vs. final); the type of name of the target consonant (consonant-vowel vs. vowel-consonant); the linguistic structure of the pseudo words (CVC vs. CCV). The results demonstrated that at the age of 5-6, the vast majority of the pre-readers and a significant number of 4-5 year-olds were able to use the letter-phoneme relationships to distinguish written words. The discussion envisages theoretical implications related to learning the sound of the letters, and outlines a few educational suggestions., Las investigaciones recientes demuestran que el conocimiento de los nombres de las letras juega un rol importante en la adquisición de la escritura durante los periodos preescolar y escolar. Dicho conocimiento contribuye al desarrollo inicial de la ortografía y en la identificación de las palabras escritas y facilita, a través de mecanismos sin duda interdependientes, el aprendizaje de las relaciones letras – fonemas y al desarrollo de la sensibilidad fonémica. El presente estudio se interesa a las relaciones entre el conocimiento del nombre de las letras y el aprendizaje del sonido de las letras. Los participantes eran prelectores francófonos escolarizados en dos niveles preescolares (4-5 y 5-6). Tenían que efectuar un ejercicio de identificación de seudo-palabras escritas por selección restringida en el cual debían identificar, en un par de seudo-palabras que diferían en una sola consonante (e.g. BOC vs VOC), la seudo-palabra pronunciada por el experimentador (por ejemplo /bok/). Los niños conocían el nombre de las consonantes utilizadas en el estudio, pero ignoraban su sonido. Se manejaron tres variables: la posición de la consonante-objetivo en la seudo-palabra (inicial vs final); el tipo de nombre de la consonante-objetivo (consonante-vocal vs vocal-consonante); la estructura lingüística de las seudo-palabras (CVC vs CCV). Los resultados demuestran que los niños prelectores eran capaces, sobre todo entre 5-6 años y de manera preponderante entre 4-5 años, de utilizar las relaciones letras-fonemas para distinguir las palabras escritas. La discusión toma en consideración las implicaciones teóricas relacionadas con el aprendizaje del sonido de las letra y esboza algunas proposiciones de carácter educativo.

This study examines the integration of graphotactic and morphological constraints in the acquisition of lexical spelling. It compares the implicit learning of new spellings (nonwords) ending with a silent letter introduced in stories that French children in grades 3 and 5 read depending on three experimental conditions. In each condition, six nonwords end with a frequent graphotactic pattern (e.g., -ot), and six with a rare graphotactic pattern (e.g., -os). In the “all opaque” condition, no morphological information justifies the presence of the silent final letter (e.g., courot or couros). The presence of this silent letter is justified by morphologically complex forms for items ending with a frequent graphotactic pattern (e.g., courot - courotage) in the "frequent morphological" condition and for items ending with a rare graphotactic pattern (e.g., couros - courosage) in the "rare morphological" condition. After reading the texts, learning to spell the nonwords is assessed with a spelling task. The results show better orthographic learning for nonwords including frequent graphotactic patterns in grades 3 and 5 and a modulation of this graphotactic effect by the presence of morphological information only in grade 5. In grade 5, among the spellings including frequent graphotactic patterns, those morphologically justified are better spelled. In grades 3 and 5, among the spellings including rare graphotactic patterns, those morphologically justified aren’t better spelled than those without morphological justification.; Cette étude examine l’intégration des contraintes graphotactiques et morphologiques dans l’acquisition de l’orthographe lexicale. Elle compare l’apprentissage implicite de l’orthographe de nouveaux mots (pseudo-mots) se terminant par une lettre muette insérés dans des textes que lisent des élèves français de CE2 et CM2 dans trois conditions expérimentales. Dans chaque condition, six pseudo-mots se terminent par un patron graphotactique fréquent (e.g., -ot), et six par un patron graphotactique plus rare (e.g., -os). Dans la condition « tout opaque », aucune information morphologique ne justifie la présence de la lettre finale muette (e.g., courot ou couros). La présence de cette lettre muette est justifiée par des formes morphologiquement complexes pour les items se terminant par un patron graphotactique fréquent (e.g., courot - courotage) dans la condition « morphologique fréquent » et pour les items se terminant par un patron graphotactique rare (e.g., couros - courosage) dans la condition « morphologique rare ». A la suite de la lecture des textes, l’apprentissage de l’orthographe des pseudo-mots est évalué avec une tâche de dictée. Les résultats montrent un meilleur apprentissage orthographique pour les pseudo-mots incluant des patrons graphotactiques fréquents en CE2 et en CM2 et une modulation de cet effet graphotactique par la présence d’informations morphologiques seulement en CM2. En CM2, parmi les orthographes incluant des patrons graphotactiques fréquents, celles morphologiquement justifiées sont les mieux restituées. En CE2 et CM2, parmi les orthographes incluant des patrons graphotactiques rares, celles morphologiquement justifiées ne sont pas mieux restituées que celles sans justification morphologique.

This study examined whether and how children in grade 3 and 5 benefit from the presence of morphological information to learn in the implicit learning of new spellings introduced in story that they read. We’ve investigates to see if this benefice differs depending on the use of the type of morphology (inflectional or derivational). For that purpose, we’ve created four experimental conditions varying by the type of morphology. The children have read stories including the nonwords. Some were morphologically simple as rouvard, and some others morphologically complex, composed by adding an inflexion or a derivation to the simple form, as rouvarde and rouvardise. In the morphological condition, the studies included simples and complexes forms and in the opaque condition, they included only simple forms. The stories have been split either in a morphologically condition (with the simple and complex forms), either in an opaque condition (only with the simple forms). Then the children were asked to choose the correct spelling of each nonword from among three phonologically plausible alternatives (rouvart, rouvar, rouvard). Our results show an orthographic learning in both conditions (morphological and opaque) regardless of the age. This learning is better in the morphological condition than in the opaque condition for both type of morphology in grade 5, but only for the inflectional condition in grade 3. Therefore, children benefit from inflectional morphology earlier than the derivational morphology in this learning situation of new words, as it has been reported in previous studies examining the orthographic productions of real words.; Cette étude examine si et comment des élèves de CE2 et CM2 bénéficient de la présence d’informations morphologiques pour apprendre implicitement l’orthographe de nouveaux mots insérés dans des histoires qu’ils lisent. Elle cherche à préciser si ce bénéfice varie en fonction du type de morphologie utilisée (flexionnelle ou dérivationnelle). Pour cela, nous avons créé quatre conditions expérimentales se différenciant notamment par le type de morphologie. Les enfants ont lu des histoires incluant des pseudo-mots. Certains étaient morphologiquement simples comme rouvard, et d’autres morphologiquement complexes, formés en ajoutant une flexion ou une dérivation à la forme simple, comme rouvarde et rouvardise. Dans la condition morphologique, les histoires incluaient les formes simples et complexes et dans la condition opaque, elles incluaient seulement les formes simples. Les élèves ont ensuite répondu à un test de décision orthographique parmi trois propositions (rouvart, rouvar, rouvard). Les résultats mettent en évidence un apprentissage orthographique dans les deux conditions (morphologiques et opaques) quel que soit l’âge. Cet apprentissage est meilleur en condition morphologique qu’en condition opaque pour les deux types de morphologies en CM2, mais seulement pour la morphologie flexionnelle en CE2. Les enfants bénéficient donc de la morphologie flexionnelle plus précocement que de la morphologie dérivationnelle dans cette situation d’apprentissage de nouveaux mots, comme cela a été rapporté dans des études antérieures examinant les productions orthographiques de vrais mots.

Pas de résumé en anglais; L’objectif de cette thèse est d’étudier le rôle des connaissances orthographiques générales,appelées connaissances graphotactiques, dans l’acquisition de l’orthographe lexicale (i.e.,l’orthographe de mots spécifiques) chez des élèves de l’école élémentaire (CE2 et CM2) etdes adultes.Une première expérience (chapitre expérimental I) confirme des études antérieures montrantque des élèves de l’école élémentaire sont sensibles à diverses régularités graphotactiques,certaines plus difficilement repérées que d’autres (e.g., Danjon & Pacton, 2009 ; Pacton et al.,2001), et les prolonge en montrant que même des adultes ne semblent pas (systématiquement)recourir à des règles spécifiant par exemple que les consonnes doubles peuvent survenir avantmais pas après les consonne simples.Une seconde expérience (chapitre expérimental II) précise le rôle des connaissances enorthographique lexicale et celui des connaissances graphotactiques lors de l’apprentissageimplicite de l’orthographe de non-mots insérés dans des textes que des élèves de CM1 et CM2lisent pour les comprendre (situation de self-teaching, Share, 1995, 1999). Des analyses derégression montrent en effet que les deux types de connaissances orthographiques expliquentdes parts de variance indépendantes du niveau d’apprentissage de l’orthographe des non-mots,même après avoir contrôlé diverses habiletés (conscience phonémique, recodagephonologique, capacité à produire des orthographes phonologiquement plausibles).Les six expériences suivantes (chapitres expérimentaux III et IV) explorent si et comment lesconnaissances graphotactiques influencent l’apprentissage de l’orthographe lexicale dansdiverses situations d’apprentissage de non-mots en manipulant le degré de convergence entreles orthographes des non-mots et les régularités graphotactiques de la langue française. Deuxpropriétés graphotactiques sont manipulées, l’une de type probabiliste (certaines consonnessont plus fréquemment doublées que d’autres), l’autre descriptible sous forme de règle (lesconsonnes doubles peuvent survenir avant mais pas après les consonnes simples). Dans diverses situations d’apprentissage (implicite vs. explicite ; non-mots insérés dans des textesvs. présentés isolément ; lecture silencieuse vs. à haute voix) et de test (rappel vs.reconnaissance), les résultats montrent que des élèves de CE2 et CM2 et des adultesacquièrent des connaissances relatives à l’orthographe de mots spécifiques (e.g., la présenced’un doublet) mais se fondent également sur leurs connaissances relatives aux régularitésgraphotactiques pour reconstruire l’orthographe des mots. Ce processus de reconstruction explique que certaines orthographes sont plus difficiles à mémoriser que d’autres ainsi que lecaractère systématique de certaines erreurs. Par exemple, les élèves et les adultes, qui serappellent de la présence d’un doublet dans un item spécifique mais ne se rappellent pas de lalettre spécifique qui est doublée, semblent se fonder sur leur sensibilité au fait que certainesconsonnes sont plus souvent doublées que d’autres, ce qui explique que les erreurs detransposition d’une consonne rarement doublée vers une consonne fréquemment doublée(tiddunar orthographié TIDUNNAR) sont beaucoup plus nombreuses que les erreurs detransposition d’une consonne fréquemment doublée vers une consonne rarement doublée(tidunnar orthographié TIDDUNAR).L’ensemble de ces expériences contribue donc à une meilleure compréhension du rôledes connaissances graphotactiques dans l’acquisition et la production de l’orthographe demots spécifiques, et plus généralement, de l’intégration de différentes sources deconnaissances dans l’acquisition du langage écrit.

Pas de résumé en anglais, L’objectif de cette thèse est d’étudier le rôle des connaissances orthographiques générales,appelées connaissances graphotactiques, dans l’acquisition de l’orthographe lexicale (i.e.,l’orthographe de mots spécifiques) chez des élèves de l’école élémentaire (CE2 et CM2) etdes adultes.Une première expérience (chapitre expérimental I) confirme des études antérieures montrantque des élèves de l’école élémentaire sont sensibles à diverses régularités graphotactiques,certaines plus difficilement repérées que d’autres (e.g., Danjon & Pacton, 2009 ; Pacton et al.,2001), et les prolonge en montrant que même des adultes ne semblent pas (systématiquement)recourir à des règles spécifiant par exemple que les consonnes doubles peuvent survenir avantmais pas après les consonne simples.Une seconde expérience (chapitre expérimental II) précise le rôle des connaissances enorthographique lexicale et celui des connaissances graphotactiques lors de l’apprentissageimplicite de l’orthographe de non-mots insérés dans des textes que des élèves de CM1 et CM2lisent pour les comprendre (situation de self-teaching, Share, 1995, 1999). Des analyses derégression montrent en effet que les deux types de connaissances orthographiques expliquentdes parts de variance indépendantes du niveau d’apprentissage de l’orthographe des non-mots,même après avoir contrôlé diverses habiletés (conscience phonémique, recodagephonologique, capacité à produire des orthographes phonologiquement plausibles).Les six expériences suivantes (chapitres expérimentaux III et IV) explorent si et comment lesconnaissances graphotactiques influencent l’apprentissage de l’orthographe lexicale dansdiverses situations d’apprentissage de non-mots en manipulant le degré de convergence entreles orthographes des non-mots et les régularités graphotactiques de la langue française. Deuxpropriétés graphotactiques sont manipulées, l’une de type probabiliste (certaines consonnessont plus fréquemment doublées que d’autres), l’autre descriptible sous forme de règle (lesconsonnes doubles peuvent survenir avant mais pas après les consonnes simples). Dans diverses situations d’apprentissage (implicite vs. explicite ; non-mots insérés dans des textesvs. présentés isolément ; lecture silencieuse vs. à haute voix) et de test (rappel vs.reconnaissance), les résultats montrent que des élèves de CE2 et CM2 et des adultesacquièrent des connaissances relatives à l’orthographe de mots spécifiques (e.g., la présenced’un doublet) mais se fondent également sur leurs connaissances relatives aux régularitésgraphotactiques pour reconstruire l’orthographe des mots. Ce processus de reconstruction explique que certaines orthographes sont plus difficiles à mémoriser que d’autres ainsi que lecaractère systématique de certaines erreurs. Par exemple, les élèves et les adultes, qui serappellent de la présence d’un doublet dans un item spécifique mais ne se rappellent pas de lalettre spécifique qui est doublée, semblent se fonder sur leur sensibilité au fait que certainesconsonnes sont plus souvent doublées que d’autres, ce qui explique que les erreurs detransposition d’une consonne rarement doublée vers une consonne fréquemment doublée(tiddunar orthographié TIDUNNAR) sont beaucoup plus nombreuses que les erreurs detransposition d’une consonne fréquemment doublée vers une consonne rarement doublée(tidunnar orthographié TIDDUNAR).L’ensemble de ces expériences contribue donc à une meilleure compréhension du rôledes connaissances graphotactiques dans l’acquisition et la production de l’orthographe demots spécifiques, et plus généralement, de l’intégration de différentes sources deconnaissances dans l’acquisition du langage écrit.