Pauline Quemart

Exploring the Role of Bases and Suffixes when Reading Familiar and Unfamiliar Words: Evidence from French Young Readers.

We examined whether French third- and fifth-grade children rely on morphemes when recognizing words and whether this reliance depends on word familiarity. We manipulated the presence of bases and suffixes in words and pseudowords to compare their contribution in a lexical decision task. Both bases and suffixes facilitated word reading accuracy and speed across all grades, even though the co-occurrence of a base and a suffix reduced the benefit associated to the presence of morphemes in third-grade children. Speed of pseudoword (i.e., unfamiliar word) reading was also influenced by base and suffix, and the combination of these units leaded to a high rate of false alarms. These results bring new evidence of morphological analysis in the reading of French familiar and unfamiliar words.

The sentence repetition task: A powerful diagnostic tool for French children with specific language impairment

This study assesses the diagnostic accuracy and construct validity of a sentence repetition task that is commonly used for the identification of French children with specific language impairment (SLI). Thirty-four school-aged children with a confirmed, diagnostically based diagnosis of SLI, and 34 control children matched on age and nonverbal abilities performed the sentence repetition task. Two general scoring measures took into account the verbatim repetition of the sentence and the number of words accurately repeated. Moreover, five other scoring measures were applied to their answers in order to separately take into account their respect of lexical items, functional items, syntax, verb morphology, and the general meaning of the sentence. Results show good to high levels of sensitivity and specificity at the three cut-off points for all scoring measures. A principal component analysis revealed two factors. Scoring measures for the respect of functional words, syntax and verb morphology provided the largest loadings to the first factor, while scoring measures for the respect of lexical words and general semantics provided the largest loadings to the second factor. Sentence repetition appears to be a valuable tool to identify SLI in French children, and the ability to repeat sentences correctly is supported by two factors: a morphosyntactic factor and a lexical factor.

Lexical spelling in children and adolescents with specific language impairment: variations with the writing situation.

The goal of this study was to compare the lexical spelling performance of children and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) in two contrasting writing situations: a dictation of isolated words (a classic evaluative situation) and a narrative of a personal event (a communicative situation). Twenty-four children with SLI and 48 typically developing children participated in the study, split into two age groups: 7-11 and 12-18 years of age. Although participants with SLI made more spelling errors per word than typically developing participants of the same chronological age, there was a smaller difference between the two groups in the narratives than in the dictations. Two of the findings are particularly noteworthy: (1) Between 12 and 18 years of age, in communicative narration, the number of spelling errors of the SLI group was not different from that of the typically developing group. (2) In communicative narration, the participants with SLI did not make specific spelling errors (phonologically unacceptable), contrary to what was shown in the dictation. From an educational perspective or that of a remediation program, it must be stressed that the communicative narration provides children-and especially adolescents-with SLI an opportunity to demonstrate their improved lexical spelling abilities. Furthermore, the results encourage long-term lexical spelling education, as adolescents with SLI continue to show improvement between 12 and 18 years of age.

Visual processing of derivational morphology in children with developmental dyslexia: Insights from masked priming

We investigated whether children with dyslexia rely on derivational morphology during visual word recognition and how the semantic and form properties of morphemes influence this processing. We conducted two masked priming experiments, in which we manipulated the semantic overlap (Experiment 1) and the form overlap (Experiment 2) between morphologically related pairs of words. In each experiment, French dyslexic readers as well as reading-level matched and chronological-age matched children performed a lexical decision task. Significant priming effects were observed in all groups, indicating that their lexicon is organized around morpheme units. Furthermore, the dyslexics’ processing of written morphology is mainly influenced by the semantic properties of morphemes, whereas children from the two control groups are mainly influenced by their form properties.

How language affects children's use of derivational morphology in visual word and pseudoword processing: evidence from a cross-language study.

Developing readers have been shown to rely on morphemes in visual word recognition across several naming, lexical decision and priming experiments. However, the impact of morphology in reading is not consistent across studies with differing results emerging not only between but also within writing systems. Here, we report a cross-language experiment involving the English and French languages, which aims to compare directly the impact of morphology in word recognition in the two languages. Monolingual French-speaking and English-speaking children matched for grade level (Part 1) and for age (Part 2) participated in the study. Two lexical decision tasks (one in French, one in English) featured words and pseudowords with exactly the same structure in each language. The presence of a root (R+) and a suffix ending (S+) was manipulated orthogonally, leading to four possible combinations in words (R+S+: e.g., postal; R+S−: e.g., turnip; R−S+: e.g., rascal; and R-S-: e.g., bishop) and in pseudowords (R+S+: e.g., pondal; R+S−: e.g., curlip; R−S+: e.g., vosnal; and R−S−: e.g., hethop). Results indicate that the presence of morphemes facilitates childrens recognition of words and impedes their ability to reject pseudowords in both languages. Nevertheless, effects extend across accuracy and latencies in French but are restricted to accuracy in English, suggesting a higher degree of morphological processing efficiency in French. We argue that the inconsistencies found between languages emphasize the need for developmental models of word recognition to integrate a morpheme level whose elaboration is tuned by the productivity and transparency of the derivational system.

Effects of Phonological and Orthographic Shifts on Children’s Processing of Written Morphology: A Time-Course Study

We report two experiments that investigated whether phonological and/or orthographic shifts in a base word interfere with morphological processing by French 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders and adults (as a control group) along the time course of visual word recognition. In both experiments, prime-target pairs shared four possible relationships: morphological without modification (nuageux-NUAGE), morphological with phonological modification (bergerie-BERGER), morphological with phonological and orthographic modifications (soigneux-SOIN), and orthographic control (fourmi-FOUR). In Experiment 1 (60-ms prime duration), priming effects were only significant in the morphological condition without modification in children but in the three morphological conditions in adults. In Experiment 2 (250-ms prime duration) priming effects were significant in all three morphological conditions in each group, independently of form shifts. These results indicate that allomorphic variation does allow for the lexical activation of base words only in the later stages of word recognition in children, whereas this activation is automatic in adults.

The Sensitivity of Children with SLI to Phonotactic Probabilities During Lexical Access

UNLABELLED The procedural deficit hypothesis (Ullman & Pierpont, 2005) has been proposed to account for the combination of linguistic and nonlinguistic deficits observed in specific language impairment (SLI). According to this proposal, SLI results from a deficit in procedural memory that prevents children from developing sensitivity to probabilistic sequences, amongst other deficits. We tested the ability of children with SLI to rely on a specific type of probabilities characterizing sequences that occur in a given language: phonotactic probabilities. Twenty French-speaking children with SLI (M=10;1), 20 typically developing children matched for chronological age (M=10;0) and 20 typically developing children matched for receptive vocabulary (M=7;4) performed an auditory lexical decision task. Pseudoword stimuli were built with combinations of either frequently associated phonemes (high phonotactic probability) or infrequently associated phonemes (low phonotactic probability). Phonotactic probabilities had a significant impact on the accuracy and speed of pseudoword rejection in children with SLI, but not in the two control groups. SLI childrens greater reliance on phonotactic probabilities relative to typically developing children appears to contradict the PD hypothesis. Phonotactic probabilities may help them to partially overcome their difficulties in developing and accessing the phonological lexicon during spoken word recognition. LEARNING OUTCOMES After reading this article, readers will understand the importance of sensitivity to phonotactic probabilities in language processing. They will also learn that such sensitivity is preserved in children with SLI. Finally, readers will understand that children with SLI are more prone to use phonotactic information when accessing their lexicon than typically-developing children.

Orthographic and morphemic effects in the written syllable counting task.

According to a recent hypothesis, the organization of letters into groups of successive consonants and vowels (i.e., CV pattern) constrains the orthographic structure of words. Here, we examined to what extent the morphological structure of words modifies the influence of the CV pattern in a syllable counting task. Participants were presented with written words matched for the number of syllables and comprising either one vowel cluster less than the number of syllables (hiatus words, e.g., création) or the same number of vowel clusters (control words, e.g., crépiter). Participants were slower and less accurate for hiatus than control stimuli, be it words (Experiments 1, 3) or pseudowords (Experiment 2). More importantly, this hiatus effect was present even when the stimuli had a morphemic boundary falling within the hiatus (e.g., ré-agir). The results suggest that the CV pattern of items more strongly influences performance in the syllable counting task than the morphological structure.

The Development of Morphological Representations in Young Readers: A Cross-Modal Priming Study.

The way children organize words in their memory has intrigued many researchers in the past 20 years. Given the large number of morphologically complex words in many languages, the influence of morphemes on this organization is being increasingly examined. The aim of this study was to understand how morphemic information influences English-speaking childrens word recognition. Children in grades 3 and 5 were asked to complete a lexical decision priming task. Prime-target pairs varied in semantic similarity, with low (e.g., belly-bell), moderate (e.g., lately-late), and high similarity relations (e.g., boldly-bold). There were also word pairs similar in form only (e.g., spinach-spin) and in semantics only (e.g., garbage-trash). Primes were auditory and targets were presented visually. Analyses of childrens lexical decision times revealed graded priming effects as a function of the convergence of form and meaning. These results indicate that developing readers do not necessarily need to lexicalize morphological units to facilitate word recognition. Their ability to process the morphological structure of words depends on their ability to develop connections between form and meaning.

The management of cohesion in written narratives in students with specific language impairment: Differences between childhood and adolescence

The goal of this study was to investigate the management of cohesion by children and adolescents with specific language impairment (SLI) when writing a narrative in a communicative situation. Twelve children with SLI (from 7 to 11 years old) and 12 adolescents with SLI (from 12 to 18 years old) were chronological age-matched with 24 typically developing (TD) children and 24 TD adolescents. All participants attended mainstream classes: children in elementary schools and adolescents in middle and high schools. Analyses of cohesion focused on both density and diversity of connectives, punctuation marks and anaphors. Results attested that children with SLI were greatly impaired in their management of written cohesion and used specific forms previously observed in narrative speech such as left dislocations. By contrast, and not expected, the management of written cohesion by adolescents with SLI was close to that of their TD peers. The communicative writing situation we set up, which engaged participants to take into account the addressee, also made possible for adolescents with SLI to manage cohesion in writing.