Cyril Perret

How does the interaction between spelling and motor processes build up during writing acquisition

How do we recall a words spelling? How do we produce the movements to form the letters of a word? Writing involves several processing levels. Surprisingly, researchers have focused either on spelling or motor production. However, these processes interact and cannot be studied separately. Spelling processes cascade into movement production. For example, in French, producing letters PAR in the orthographically irregular word PARFUM (perfume) delays motor production with respect to the same letters in the regular word PARDON (pardon). Orthographic regularity refers to the possibility of spelling a word correctly by applying the most frequent sound-letter conversion rules. The present study examined how the interaction between spelling and motor processing builds up during writing acquisition. French 8-10 year old children participated in the experiment. This is the age handwriting skills start to become automatic. The children wrote regular and irregular words that could be frequent or infrequent. They wrote on a digitizer so we could collect data on latency, movement duration and fluency. The results revealed that the interaction between spelling and motor processing was present already at age 8. It became more adult-like at ages 9 and 10. Before starting to write, processing irregular words took longer than regular words. This processing load spread into movement production. It increased writing duration and rendered the movements more dysfluent. Word frequency affected latencies and cascaded into production. It modulated writing duration but not movement fluency. Writing infrequent words took longer than frequent words. The data suggests that orthographic regularity has a stronger impact on writing than word frequency. They do not cascade in the same extent.

Psycholinguistic norms and face naming times for photographs of celebrities in French.

A set of 105 photographs of celebrities has been standardized in French on distinctiveness, proper name agreement, face agreement, age of acquisition (AoA), and subjective frequency. Statistics on the collected variables for photographs are provided. The relationships between these variables have been analyzed. Face naming latencies have also been collected for the photographs of celebrities, and several multiple regression analyses have been carried out on naming latencies and percentages of tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomena. The main determinants of naming speed included AoA, face agreement, and name agreement. In addition, AoA, together with distinctiveness and face agreement, reliably predicted the percentages of TOTs. The norms, photographs of the celebrities, and spoken naming latencies corresponding to the celebrities are available on the Internet at norms.celebrities.googlepages.com and should be of great use to researchers interested in the processing of famous people.

Exploring the multiple-level hypothesis of AoA effects in spoken and written object naming using a topographic ERP analysis

Here we tested the multiple-loci hypothesis of age-of-acquisition effects in both spoken and handwritten object naming using Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and spatiotemporal segmentation analysis. Participants had to say aloud or write down picture names that varied on frequency trajectory (age-of-acquisition). Early-acquired words yielded shorter naming times than late-acquired words in both spoken and written naming. More importantly, AoA modulated ERPs only during a later time-window in both output modalities: waveforms started to diverge around 400 ms, which corresponded to the end of a period of topographic stability starting at around 260 ms in both conditions. These stable electrophysiological maps lasted longer in the late than in the early-acquired condition and shifted the onset of the following periods of stable electrophysiological activity. Taken together, the findings are at odds with the multiple loci hypothesis, but support the hypothesis that AoA affects a single encoding level, namely the word-form encoding process.

Comparison of single-word and adjective-noun phrase production using event-related brain potentials

The present study builds upon findings from event-related potential (ERP) studies of single word production in order to shed light onto the mechanisms underlying the production of dual-word adjective-noun phrases (NPs). In a first experiment, we tested for potential differences elicited by visual stimuli varying in complexity -black and white line drawings, coloured line drawings, and arrays of drawings-in participants producing single nouns. Whilst naming latencies were similar for single noun production between visual stimuli conditions, ERPs differed between drawing arrays and single drawings in a time-window extending beyond early visual analysis. In a second experiment, different participants were asked to produce either single noun or adjective-noun dual-word phrases to black-and-white and coloured line drawings, respectively. Adjective-noun phrase production (2W) resulted in naming latencies 53 msec longer than single noun (1W) production. Waveform amplitude and topographic analyses carried out on stimulus- and response-aligned ERPs indicated that the two conditions differed in a late time-window, with a topographic pattern for 2W lasting from 300 to 480 msec after picture presentation whereas the corresponding pattern for 1W production lasted from 300 to 450 msec. Since this time window has been previously associated with phonological encoding in single word production, this result suggests that the cost of planning the second word in dual-word production may be incurred during phonological encoding of the first word. The results are discussed in light of current models of single and multi-word production.

Taking advantage of between- and within-participant variability?

⟪ All other things being equal or held constant ⟫ (i.e., ceteris paribus). This experimental principle is probably one of first concepts that teachers present in methodology courses in universities all around the word. Studying the influence of one (or more) experimental factors on a specific dependent variable requires an adequate control of all other sources that might affect it. This epistemological position is directly derived from positivism (e.g., Comte, 1869, 2010). According to this view, the most important scope in science is to develop theories that describe and model the environment and at the same time exclude all micro-variations. In other—philosophical—words, science attempts to understand what remains invariant despite constant transformation of the world. Language sciences follow this principle (psycholinguistics, linguistics, neurobiology of language processing, among others). Most studies try to differentiate the characteristics that human beings share—i.e., universals—from what is individual or specific.

The impact of developmental dyslexia and dysgraphia on movement production during word writing

ABSTRACT This study investigated how deficits in orthographic processing affect movement production during word writing. Children with dyslexia and dysgraphia wrote words and pseudo-words on a digitizer. The words were orthographically regular and irregular of varying frequency. The group analysis revealed that writing irregular words and pseudo-words increased movement duration and dysfluency. This indicates that the spelling processes were active while the children were writing the words. The impact of these spelling processes was stronger for the children with dyslexia and dysgraphia. The analysis of individual performance revealed that most dyslexic/dysgraphic children presented similar writing patterns. However, selective lexical processing deficits affected irregular word writing but not pseudo-word writing. Selective poor sublexical processing affected pseudo-word writing more than irregular word writing. This study suggests that the interaction between orthographic and motor processing constitutes an important cognitive load that may disrupt the graphic outcome of the children with dyslexia/dysgraphia.

Which variables should be controlled for to investigate picture naming in adults? A Bayesian meta-analysis

Selecting items for designing psycholinguistic experiments can be a very hard and time-consuming process, because of the large number of variables that need to be controlled for. This is clearly the case for picture-naming experiments because, thanks to the collection of psycholinguistic norms on both pictures and their names, a large number of factors that affect naming speed and/or accuracy have been found. In the present study, a Bayesian meta-analysis was performed to determine the extent to which the variables that have generally been considered by researchers as important to control for are indeed worth taking into account. The meta-analysis revealed that most of the variables that are considered in picture-naming studies have a strong or very strong influence on naming speed (image agreement, name agreement, image variability/imageability, age of acquisition, and conceptual familiarity), whereas two variables that are very often taken into account (visual complexity and length) yielded null effects. The results were inconclusive for lexical frequency. At a methodological level, Bayesian meta-analyses constitute a very useful tool for guiding researchers when selecting materials for experiments.

Dynamique de préparation de la réponse verbale et électroencéphalographie: une revue

Resume Depuis une quinzaine d’annees, l’enregistrement de l’activite electro-encephalographique (EEG) suite a un evenement donne (c’est-a-dire, les potentiels evoques, ERP) est devenu un outil essentiel pour les etudes portant sur la production verbale conceptuellement dirigee. Dans cet article, nous nous proposons de faire une revue de ces travaux en adoptant un point de vue historique et methodologique. Une premiere partie est dediee a la presentation des caracteristiques de cette mesure, son enregistrement et les traitements necessaires a son utilisation. Une deuxieme partie est consacree a la description des differents paradigmes et leurs evolutions recentes avec une focalisation sur les contraintes issues de la mesure de l’activite electro-physiologique. Enfin, deux exemples d’etudes utilisant la denomination immediate d’images sont rapportes. L’objectif poursuivi est de montrer en quoi, bien que l’enregistrement EEG/ERP n’a pas vocation a remplacer les autres mesures du comportement, il permet d’explorer des hypotheses difficilement testables autrement.