Alix Seigneuric

Reading comprehension in French 1st and 2nd grade children: Contribution of decoding and language comprehension

This paper reports a study conducted with French first-grade and second-grade children (mean age: 6;8 and 7;8 respectively). The first aim was to re-examine the Gough and Tunmer’s (1986) Simple View in assessing the specific contribution of decoding ability and language comprehension to reading comprehension. The second one was to analyse the difficulties of children in reading comprehension. Reading and listening comprehension were assessed using both visual and auditory version of the same test. Decoding ability was assessed by means of a nonword reading test. On the basis of reading comprehension scores, skilled and less skilled comprehenders were contrasted, and then two groups of less skilled comprehenders were differentiated on the basis of the decoding scores.Hierarchical regression analyses computed on the whole sample showed that listening comprehension was a more powerful predictor than decoding ability in first- and second-grade children. In both grades, the pattern of performance in less skilled comprehenders showed a relative independence between decoding and reading comprehension. The good decoders’ group and the poor decoders’ group showed similar poor performance in reading comprehension and poor performance in listening comprehension. However, their difficulties could stem from different sources. Some instructional recommendations were formulated taking into account individual differences in decoding and spoken language abilities, as soon as the first months of formal reading acquisition.RésuméCet article décrit une étude conduite avec des enfants français de première année d’école primaire (CP, âge moyen: 6 ans 8) et de deuxième année (CEl, âge moyen: 7 ans 8). Le premier objectif était d’examiner le modèle de Gough et Tunmer (1986) en évaluant les contributions spécifiques du décodage et de la compréhension de l’oral dans la compréhension de l’écrit. Le second était d’analyser les difficultés des enfants faibles compreneurs de l’écrit. La compréhension de l’écrit et de l’oral a été évaluée à l’aide d’un test utilisé en versions écrite et orale. Le décodage a été mesuré par un test de lecture de nonmots. Sur la base des scores de compréhension de l’écrit, deux groupes de bons et de faibles compreneurs ont été sélectionnés, puis deux sousgroupes de faibles compreneurs ont été différenciés sur leur niveau de décodage.Les deux analyses de régression hiérarchique effectuées sur les échantillons complets de chaque âge montrent que la compréhension de l’oral est un prédicteur plus puissant que le décodage pour les enfants de première année et pour ceux de deuxième année. Pour ces deux années, les profils de performances des faibles compreneurs montrent une relative indépendance entre le décodage et la compréhension de l’écrit. Les bons et les faibles décodeurs n’atteignent que de médiocres performances en compréhension de l’écrit et de l’oral, leurs difficultés provenant probablement de différentes sources. Des recommandations sont formulées prenant en compte les différences individuelles dans le décodage et la compréhension de l’oral, observées dès les premiers mois d’apprentissage de l’écrit.

The Nose Tells it to the Eyes: Crossmodal Associations between Olfaction and Vision

Crossmodal linkage between the olfactory and visual senses is still largely underexplored. In this study, we investigated crossmodal olfactory – visual associations by testing whether and how visual processing of objects is affected by the presence of olfactory cues. To this end, we explored the influence of prior learned associations between an odour (eg odour of orange) and a visual stimulus naturally associated with that odour (picture of orange) on the movements of the eyes over a complex scene. Participants were asked to freely explore a photograph containing an odour-related visual cue embedded among other objects while being exposed to the corresponding odour (subjects were unaware of the presence of the odour). Eye movements were recorded to analyse the order and distribution of fixations on each object of the scene. Our data show that the odour-related visual cue was explored faster and for a shorter time in the presence of the congruent odour. These findings suggest that odours can affect visual processing by attracting attention to the possible odour source and by facilitating its identification.

A linguistic dissociation in Williams syndrome: Good at gender agreement but poor at lexical retrieval

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rareneuro-developmental disorder characterised byspared language in the face of serious deficitsin nonlinguistic cognitive abilities. Weconducted a study on ten WS individuals inwhich gender agreement and gender assignmentwere assessed by means of two tasks: gendercategorisation and gender concord. Subjectsperformed gender categorisation to real nounswhose gender was regular or exceptional giventheir ending, and to invented nouns which werecomposed of nonword or word stems and realword-endings. The same material was used in thegender concord task in which subjects had tomatch the items with the appropriate form ofthe article and the adjective carrying genderagreement. In the gender categorisation of realwords, WS were lower than controls but bothgroups demonstrated a similar sensitivity togender-ending regularities. In the gendercategorisation of nonwords, the results showeda clear dissociation. The WS subjects producedmore ending-consistent responses than thecontrols. Contrary to the controls, WS reliedheavily on the gender clue provided by theending even when the gender of the word evokedby the stem of the invented word was opposed tothat evoked by the ending. Participants with WSwere not influenced by the specific word evokedby the stem of the invented word. In the secondtask (concord task), the WS subjects performed well although lower than thecontrols. We concluded that the WS people werenot impaired in gender agreement which relieson syntactic rules and/or on the extraction ofregularities but experienced difficulties inretrieving lexical instances.

Evidence for a Preserved Sensitivity to Orthographic Redundancy and an Impaired Access to Phonological Syllables in French Developmental Dyslexics.

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.

Children’s comprehension skill and the understanding of nominal metaphors

According to Levorato and Cacciaris global elaboration model, understanding figurative language is explained by the same processes and background knowledge that are required for literal language. In this study, we investigated the relation between childrens comprehension skill and the ability to understand referential nominal metaphors. Two groups of poor versus good comprehenders (8- to 10-year-olds) matched for word reading and vocabulary skills were invited to identify the referent of nouns used metaphorically or literally in short texts. Compared with good comprehenders, performance of poor comprehenders showed a substantial decrease in the metaphoric condition. Moreover, their performance was strongly affected by the degree of semantic incongruence between the terms of the nominal metaphor. These findings are discussed in relation to several factors, in particular the ability to use contextual information and semantic processing.

Exposure to androstenes influences processing of emotional words

There is evidence that human-produced androstenes affect attitudinal, emotional and physiological states in a context-dependent manner, suggesting that they could be involved in modulating social interactions. For instance, androstadienone appears to increase attention specifically to emotional information. Most of the previous work focused on one or two androstenes. Here, we tested whether androstenes affect linguistic processing, using three different androstene compounds. Participants (90 women and 77 men) performed a lexical decision task after being exposed to an androstene or to a control treatment (all compounds were applied on the philtrum). We tested effects on three categories of target words, varying in emotional valence: positive, competitive, and neutral words (e.g., hope, war, and century, respectively). Results show that response times were modulated by androstene treatment and by emotional valence of words. Androstenone, but not androstadienone and androstenol, significantly slowed down the reaction time to words with competitive valence. Moreover, men exposed to androstenol showed a significantly reduced error rate, although men tended to make more errors than women in general. This suggests that these androstenes modulate the processing of emotional words, namely some particular lexical emotional content may become more salient under the effect of androstenes.