Jean-Emile Gombert

Children's orthographic representations and linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French, and Spanish

Three experiments were conducted to compare the development of orthographic representations in children learning to read English, French, or Spanish. Nonsense words that shared both orthography and phonology at the level of the rhyme with real words ( cake-dake, comic-bomic ), phonology only ( cake-daik, comic-bommick ), or neither ( faish, ricop ) were created for each orthography. Experiment I compared English and French childrens reading of nonsense words that shared rhyme orthography with real words ( dake ) with those that did not ( daik ). Significant facilitation was found for shared rhymes in English, with reduced effects in French. Experiment 2 compared English and French childrens reading of nonsense words that shared rhyme phonology with real words ( daik ) with those that did not ( faish ). Significant facilitation for shared rhyme phonology was found in both languages. Experiment 3 compared English, French, and Spanish childrens reading of nonsense words ( dake vs. faish ) and found a significant facilitatory effect of orthographic and phonological familiarity for each language. The size of the familiarity effect, however, was much greater in the less transparent orthographies (English and French). These results are interpreted in terms of the level of phonology that is represented in the orthographic recognition units being developed by children who are learning to read more and less transparent orthographies.

Implicit and explicit syntactic knowledge and reading in pre-adolescents

This aim of this paper is to analyse the links between syntactic awareness and reading, in its recoding and comprehension aspects, in pre-adolescent readers. The study, conducted with 83 sixth grade pupils, examined the relation between (1) seven syntactic and morpho-syntactic tasks (repetition, judgment, correction, localization, explanation, replication and identification) and (2) several indicators of recoding and comprehension in reading. Regression analyses revealed differential contributions as a function of syntactic task, type of agrammaticality, and the aspect of reading tested, after we had controlled for the influence of reasoning, memory, and linguistic competences. Contributions resulting from the morpho-syntactic tasks were observed more frequently for recoding, whereas those involving the inversion of word or phrase orders operated more frequently as indicators of reading comprehension. The more explicit the syntactic awareness tasks, the more frequent and greater their contribution to reading performances. Comparisons of syntactic performances as a function of three levels of reading comprehension (good, average, poor) revealed a syntactic deficit in the poor comprehenders. The poor comprehenders exhibited a deficit in the majority of the syntactic tasks. The average comprehenders achieved lower performances than the good comprehenders in the tasks assessing explicit knowledge of syntax but not in those assessing implicit knowledge.

Writing in preliterate children

Abstract The purpose of this study was to gauge the knowledge young children have of writing conventions. To accomplish this, children age 3 to 6 years were asked to ‘write’ dictated pairs of words and sets of sentences designed in such a way that one of the members of the pair or set was phonologically included in the other(s). Following this, the subjects were asked to draw pictures of the objects referred to by the dictated words. Finally, in a later experimental session, they performed a force-choice task which involved selecting the best of three ‘writing’ samples: their own production, a drawing, and standard writing. The results obtained are roughly consistent with those found in previous research. Nevertheless, they provide evidence that children, some as young as age 3, have the capability to produce graphics which exhibit some of the characteristics of writing.

Children with Down Syndrome Use Phonological Knowledge in Reading.

Contrary to the findings of Cossu, Rossini &Marshall [(1993a), Cognition 46: 129–138], the present experiment showed a clear link between phonological awareness and reading performance in children with Down syndrome. Although metaphonologicalperformance was lower in children with Downsyndrome than in normal controls of the samereading level, phonological awareness andreading were significantly correlated in bothgroups. However, children with Down syndromeremained deficient in skills such as rhymingwhich are not practised as a result ofliteracy. These results are discussed withinthe framework of Gomberts metalinguisticdevelopment theory where, on the basis of aninitial phonological sensitivity, alphabeticreading is a pacemaker for the development ofexplicit phonological awareness.

How do illiterate adults react to metalinguistic training

The present study focuses on the capacity of illiterate adults to master three different metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological length of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of sentences. Illiterates’ performance, during a pre-test and after training, was compared with that of literates and partial illiterates (adults at the beginning of the process of acquiring literacy) who received the same training. In the pre-test, illiterates were lower than literates in the three tasks; and partial-illiterates were at an intermediate level in two of the tasks. The three groups profited from the training, especially illiterates and partial-illiterates for whom improvement was dramatic across all three tasks. Finally, the results revealed a hierarchy of difficulty across the tasks. The capacity to focus on the phonological dimension seemed to be a prerequisite for the phoneme deletion ability. The task of lexical segmentation seemed to be more a measure of syntactic awareness than a measure of phonological awareness.

Metacognition, Metalanguage and Metapragmatics

Abstract In this article, the author briefly reports John Flavells analysis of metacognition. By attempting to integrate metalinguistic activities into this analysis, the author brings to light several interesting characteristics of the field of meta-linguistics and its current state of research. Firstly, it appears that, unlike other meta-abilities, the metalinguistic abilities are defined in terms of their objects. On this basis, metalinguistic activities are at least partially independent of other metacognitive activities. Secondly, it appears that the position of metapragmatics in relation to meta-linguistics is in need of greater clarification. In particular, it seems necessary to draw a distinction between metapragmatic knowledge and metapragmatic experience. The fact that this distinction is not usually made contributes to the heterogeneity of this field of study and gives rise to fruitless controversy. Finally, the analysis reveals that the manipulation of writing mobilises aspects of metalinguis...

Computer-based training with ortho-phonological units in dyslexic children: new investigations.

This study aims to show that training using a computer game incorporating an audio-visual phoneme discrimination task with phonological units, presented simultaneously with orthographic units, might improve literacy skills. Two experiments were conducted, one in secondary schools with dyslexic children (Experiment 1) and the other in a speech-therapy clinic with individual case studies (Experiment 2). A classical pre-test, training, post-test design was used. The main findings indicated an improvement in reading scores after short intensive training (10 h) in Experiment 1 and progress in the reading and spelling scores obtained by the dyslexic children (training for 8 h) in Experiment 2. These results are discussed within the frameworks of both the speech-specific deficit theory of dyslexia and the connectionist models of reading development.

What do children do when they fail to count phonemes

An analysis of childrens responses in phoneme counting tasks provides a way of accessing their conception of the smallest phonological unit. Thus, in order to understand the development of phonological awareness, the types of errors children make in these tasks were analysed. A group of 5to 6-year-olds (preliterate), a group of 6to 7-year-olds (grade 1), a group of 7to 8-year-olds (grade 2), and a group of 6to 7-year-olds who, after 4 months of learning to read, were unable to decode new words were presented a task that involved counting phonemes in words and nonwords. In addition to description of the emergence of the ability to focus on phonemic segments, our interest was in analysing the incorrect responses, including the possible types of segmentation as a function of the pronunciation of the items. Nonliterate subjects (preliterate children or nonreaders from grade 1) counted syllables; the beginning readers (grade 1) often failed to analyse the onset or the rime of the syllables into phonemes. Therefore, they appeared to be using an analysis that was intermediate between onset-rime segments and phonemes. The older children (grade 2) tended to count letters as opposed to phonemes, producing more than one tap for a digraph.

Metalinguistic Development in First-Language Acquisition

At a very early age, the child is able to manipulate language appropriately, both in its comprehension and its production. Later comes the ability to reflect upon and deliberately control its use. The emergence of these metalinguistic abilities must be distinguished from that of ordinary verbal communication. The key questions concerning this topic are: What is metalinguistics? What knowledge do metalinguistic abilities require? Are they conscious activities? And how do they develop? (also see the review by Tunmer in Volume 2 and by Nicholson in this volume.)