Norbert Maïonchi-Pino

Do Consonant Sonority and Status Influence Syllable-Based Segmentation Strategies in a Visual Letter Detection Task? Developmental Evidence in French Children.

This article queries whether consonant sonority (sonorant vs. obstruent) and status (coda vs. onset) within intervocalic clusters influence syllable-based segmentation strategies. We used a modified version of the illusory conjunction paradigm to test whether French beginning, intermediate, and advanced readers were sensitive to an optimal “sonorant coda–obstruent onset” sonority profile within the syllable boundaries as a cue for a syllable-based segmentation. Data showed that children used a syllable-based segmentation that improved with reading skills and age. The results are discussed to support that the visual letter detection within pseudowords primarily and early relies on acoustic-phonetic cues within the syllable boundaries, whereas the syllable effect seems to be developmentally constrained by reading skills and age.

Is the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia related to impaired phonological representations and to universal phonological grammar

To date, the nature of the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia is still debated. We concur with possible impairments in the representations of the universal phonological constraints that universally govern how phonemes co-occur as a source of this deficit. We were interested in whether-and how-dyslexic children have sensitivity to sonority-related markedness constraints. We tested 10 French dyslexic children compared with 20 typically developing chronological age-matched and reading level-matched controls. All were tested with two aurally administered syllable counting tasks that manipulated well-formedness of unattested consonant clusters, as determined by universal phonological sonority-related markedness constraints (onset clusters in Experiment 1; intervocalic clusters in Experiment 2). Surprisingly, dyslexic childrens response patterns were similar to those in both control groups; as universal phonological sonority-related markedness increased, dyslexic children increasingly perceptually confused and phonologically repaired clusters with an illusory epenthetic vowel (e.g., /ʁəbal/). Although dyslexic children were systematically slower, like both control groups, they were influenced by universal sonority-related markedness constraints and hierarchically ranked constraints specific to French over evident acoustic-phonetic contrasts or sonority-unrelated cues. Our results are counterintuitive but innovative and compete to question an impaired universal phonological grammar because dyslexic children were found to have normal universal phonological constraints and were skilled to restore phonotactically legal syllable structures with a language-specific illusory epenthetic vowel (i.e., /ə/-like vowel). We discuss them regarding active phonological decoding and recoding processes within the framework of the optimality theory.

Is Syllable Segmentation Developmentally Constrained by Consonant Sonority within Syllable Boundaries in Silent Reading? Evidence in French Children.

There is agreement that French typically reading children use syllable-sized units to segment words. Although the statistical properties of the initial syllables or the clusters within syllable boundaries seem to be crucial for syllable segmentation, little is known about the role of consonant sonority in silent reading. In two experiments that used audio-visual and visual pseudoword recognition tasks with 300 French typically developing children, we showed a progressive increase in the use of syllable segmentation from the first through fifth years of reading instruction. The children were influenced both by an optimal ‘sonorant coda–obstruent onset’ sonority profile and by the individual position-dependent consonant sonority within syllable boundaries. Orthographic and phonological statistical properties did not clearly modulate the response patterns. We provide innovative data to help further understand the developmental course of the use of syllable segmentation as determined by sonority. We discuss our results in the light of linguistic principles.

Phonological Restriction Knowledge in Dyslexia: Universal or Language-Specific?

Developmental dyslexia is the most studied and well-documented of the specific learning disabilities in school-age children across languages, which reaches from 5-to-17.5% individuals (e.g., Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2005; Snowling, 2001). There is now a consensus that developmental dyslexia stems from a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder that does not depend on inadequate intellectual or educational backgrounds (e.g., Lyon, Shaywitz, & Shaywitz, 2003; Sprenger-Charolles, Cole, Lacert, & Serniclaes, 2000; Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon, 2004). There is considerable evidence for a phonological deficit as the major correlate of language disabilities in dyslexia, which underpins the cognitive disorder (e.g., Ramus, Rosen, Dakin, Day, Castellote, White, & Frith, 2003; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). However, an outstanding, long-lasting question that remains unclear, even unanswered, is what underlies the phonological deficit in dyslexia (e.g., Ramus, 2001). Three main directions have been proposed to account for the phonological deficit: 1) limited phonological short-term memory; 2) degraded, under-specified or, conversely, overspecified phonological representations; 3) speech perception disorders. However, the degraded, under-specified phonological representation hypothesis that is basically referred to accounts for the dyslexics’ phonological deficit has been recently challenged: it has been suggested that the dyslexics’ phonological deficit relies on difficulties to store, access, and retrieve the phonological representations (e.g., Ahissar, 2007; Ramus & Szenkovits, 2008; Szenkovits & Ramus, 2005). To date, to reconcile both views, it has been proposed that the phonological deficit results in multi-dimensional difficulties that include difficulties to learn and manipulate the speech units as well as difficulties to store, access, and retrieve the phonological representations (e.g., Snowling, 2001; Ziegler, Castel, Pech-Geogel, George, Alario, & Perry, 2008). Despite this tentative proposal, there is no consensus. Here, I propose to draw an up-to-date portrait of an alternative option that has not been studied so far to disentangle whether another possible source of the phonological deficit in dyslexia may be envisaged: Are dyslexics sensitive to universal phonological knowledge?