Arlette Verhaeghe

Enantiomorphy through the looking glass: literacy effects on mirror-image discrimination.

To examine whether enantiomorphy (i.e., the ability to discriminate lateral mirror images) is influenced by the acquisition of a written system that incorporates mirrored letters (e.g., b and d), unschooled illiterate adults were compared with people reading the Latin alphabet, namely, both schooled literate adults and unschooled adults alphabetized in adulthood. In various sorting and same-different comparison tasks with nonlinguistic materials, illiterate participants displayed some sensitivity to enantiomorphic contrasts but performed far worse than all the other participant groups when the task required paying attention to such contrasts. The difficulties of illiterate participants were more severe with enantiomorphs than with rotations in the plane or shape contrasts. Learning a written system that incorporates enantiomorphic letters thus pushes the beginning reader to break the mirror invariance characteristic of the visual system, and this process generalizes beyond the realm of symbolic characters.

Promoting phonemic analysis ability among kindergartners

Two longitudinal studies following the design used by Lundberg et als (1988) aimed at examining the effects of different metaphonological training programs on phonemic analysis ability acquisition among kindergartners (mean age: 5 years 5 months in both studies). In Study 1, two training programs involving either rhymes, syllables and phonemes, or rhymes and syllables only, were administered to different groups. Progress in phonemic analysis ability was exclusively observed in the group whose training included phonemes. An untrained control group displayed no progress in metaphonological ability. In Study 2, two training programs involving either phonemes or syllables were administered to different groups. A third group was trained on non-linguistic visual analysis. Specific effects of training on phonemic analysis ability were disclosed again. While a phoneme-to-supraphoneme generalization was found among the group trained with phonemes, the reverse did not happen among the group trained with syllables. These results support the idea that processes involved in syllabic analysis of speech or in rhyme manipulation cannot be applied to its phonemic structure. In addition, training with non-linguistic visual analysis did not entail any progress in metaphonological ability, thus providing evidence that phonological awareness cannot be promoted by analysis abilities acquired in another domain.