Pascale Colé

MANULEX: A grade-level lexical database from French elementary school readers

This article presents MANULEX, a Web-accessible database that provides grade-level word frequency lists of nonlemmatized and lemmatized words (48,886 and 23,812 entries, respectively) computed from the 1.9 million words taken from 54 French elementary school readers. Word frequencies are provided for four levels: first grade (G1), second grade (G2), third to fifth grades (G3-5), and all grades (G1-5). The frequencies were computed following the methods describedby Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971) and Zeno, Ivenz, Millard, and Duwuri (1995), with four statistics at each level (F, overall word frequency;D, index of dispersion across the selectedreaders;U, estimated frequencyper million words; andSFI, standard frequency index). The database also provides the number of letters in the word and syntactic category information. MANULEX is intended to be a useful tool for studying language development through the selection of stimuli based on precise frequency norms. Researchers in artificial intelligence can also use it as a source of information on natural language processing to simulate written language acquisition in children. Finally, it may serve an educational purpose by providing basic vocabulary lists.

On the relationship between morphological and phonological awareness: Effects of training in kindergarten and in first-grade reading

This study examined the relationship between phonological and morphological awareness in kindergarten, and their respective influence on learning to read in first grade, through an experimental training design with three groups of children. One experimental group received phonological awareness training while the other received morphological awareness training. The control group did not receive any training. Both training sessions were efficient since the largest pre- and post-test improvements were observed in the trained domains. Reciprocal influence analysis indicated that morphological awareness improved phonological sensitivity, but not the explicit manipulation of phonemes. In addition, phonological awareness training helped children to segment morphemes, but not to derive complex words. Thus, while some processes are shared by both metalinguistic domains, each domain appears to have its own specificity and may develop independently, at least partly. Even though morphological awareness training was found to be efficient at the kindergarten level, no clear impact on reading was found at the first-grade level, while phonological training displayed a clear positive effect on reading.

Early metalinguistic awareness of derivational morphology: Observations from a comparison of English and French

This cross-linguistic comparison of metalinguistic development in French and English examines early ability to manipulate derivational suffixes in oral language games as a function of chronological age, receptive vocabulary, and year of schooling. Data from judgment and production tasks are presented for children aged between 5 and 8 years in their first, second, or third school year in the United Kingdom and France. The results suggest that metamorphological development is accelerated in French relative to English. The French advantage encompasses knowledge of a broader range of suffixes and a markedly greater facility for generalizing morphological knowledge to novel contexts. These findings are interpreted in relation to the word formation systems of English and French, and the educational context in each country.

Differing sequences of metaphonological development in French and English

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable --> onset-rime --> phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a childs native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English speakers aged 4;11 (N = 10), 5;3 (N = 21), and 6;5 (N = 23) and French speakers aged 5;6 (N = 35), and 6;8 (N = 34). Experiment 2 assesses performance in the common unit task using English speakers aged 4;7 (N = 22), 5;7 (N = 23), and 6;11 (N = 22), and French speakers aged 4;7 (N = 20), 5;6 (N = 35), and 6;7 (N = 33). The experiments reveal crosslinguistic differences in the processing of syllables prior to school entry with French speakers exhibiting a greater consistency in manipulating syllables. Phoneme awareness emerges in both languages once reading instruction is introduced and rime awareness appears to follow rather than precede this event. Thus, the emergence of phonological awareness did not show a universal pattern but rather was subject to the influence of both native language and literacy.

The role of form and meaning in the processing of written morphology: A priming study in French developing readers.

Three visual priming experiments using three different prime durations (60ms in Experiment 1, 250ms in Experiment 2, and 800ms in Experiment 3) were conducted to examine which properties of morphemes (form and/or meaning) drive developing readers processing of written morphology. French third, fifth, and seventh graders and adults (the latter as a control group) performed lexical decision tasks in which targets were preceded by morphological (e.g., tablette-TABLE, little table-table), pseudoderived (e.g., baguette-BAGUE, little stick-ring), orthographic control (e.g., abricot-ABRI, apricot-shelter), and semantic control (e.g., Tulipe-FLEUR, tulip-flower) primes. Across all groups, different patterns of priming were observed in both morphological and orthographic/semantic control conditions, suggesting that they all process morphemes as units when reading. In developing readers, the processing of written morphology is triggered by the form properties of morphemes, and their semantic properties are activated later in the time course of word recognition. In adults, patterns of priming were similar except that the activation of the form properties of morphemes decreased earlier in the time course of word recognition. Taken together, these findings indicate that French developing readers process both the form and meaning properties of morphemes when reading and support a progressive quantitative change in the development of morphological processing over the course of reading development.

Morphological effects in children word reading: A priming study in fourth graders

A growing corpus of evidence suggests that morphology could play a role in reading acquisition, and that young readers could be sensitive to the morphemic structure of written words. In the present experiment, we examined whether and when morphological information is activated in word recognition. French fourth graders made visual lexical decisions to derived words preceded by primes sharing either a morphological or an orthographic relationship with the target. Results showed significant and equivalent facilitation priming effects in cases of morphologically and orthographically related primes at the shortest prime duration, and a significant facilitation priming effect in the case of only morphologically related primes at the longer prime duration. Thus, these results strongly suggest that a morphological level is involved in childrens visual word recognition, although it is not distinct from the formal one at an early stage of word processing.

Reading in French-speaking adults with dyslexia

This study investigated the reading and reading-related skills of 15 French-speaking adults with dyslexia, whose performance was compared with that of chronological-age controls (CA) and reading-level controls (RL). Experiment 1 assessed the efficiency of their phonological reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term memory, and rapid automatic naming (RAN)) and experiment 2 assessed the efficiency of their lexical and sublexical (or phonological) reading procedures (reading aloud of pseudowords and irregular words of different lengths). Experiment 1 revealed that adults with dyslexia exhibited lower phonological reading-related skills than CAs only, and were better than RL controls on the RAN. In experiment 2, as compared with RL controls, only a deficit in the sublexical reading procedure was observed. The results of the second experiment replicated observations from English-language studies but not those of the first experiment. Several hypotheses are discussed to account for these results, including one related to the transparency of orthographic systems.

Stem and derivational-suffix processing during reading by French second and third graders

Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as chat-ure (cat-ish) composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real derivational suffix (e.g., chot-ure) or a pseudostem and a pseudosuffix (e.g., chot-ore). More, the chot-ure items were read faster and more accurately than the chot-ore items. These results suggest that beginning French readers are able to use morphological units (both stems and derivational suffixes) to decode new words. The second experiment compared the impact of display format on reading time. Suffixed words were presented in four segmentation formats: syllabic (ma lade), morphological (mal ade), morphological + 1 grapheme (mala de), or unsegmented (malade). For both groups of readers, the morphological + 1 condition generated the longest reading times but there was no difference between the other three conditions. It was concluded that syllables, morphemes, and whole word forms contribute to a similar extent to word reading for low-frequency words. Morphological processing may therefore be used early by French children to identify both new words and low-frequency words.

Reading and Reading-Related Skills in Children Using Cochlear Implants: Prospects for the Influence of Cued Speech

We assessed the reading and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory) of deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI), either exposed to cued speech early (before 2 years old) (CS+) or never (CS-). Their performance was compared to that of 2 hearing control groups, 1 matched for reading level (RL), and 1 matched for chronological age (CA). Phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory were assessed respectively through a phonemic similarity judgment task and through a word span task measuring phonological similarity effects. To assess the use of sublexical and lexical reading procedures, children read pseudowords and irregular words aloud. Results showed that cued speech improved performance on both the phonemic awareness and the reading tasks but not on the phonological short-term memory task. In phonemic awareness and reading, CS+ children obtained accuracy and rapidity scores similar to CA controls, whereas CS- children obtained lower scores than hearing controls. Nevertheless, in phonological short-term memory task, the phonological similarity effect of both CI groups was similar. Overall, these results support the use of cued speech to improve phonemic awareness and reading skills in CI children.