Pierre Largy

CHRONOMETRY OF VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION DURING PASSIVE AND LEXICAL DECISION TASKS: AN ERP INVESTIGATION

In order to investigate the neuroanatomical chronometry of word processing, two experiments using: Event Related Potentials (ERPs) have been performed. The first one was designed to test the effects of orthographic, phonologic, and lexical properties of linguistic items on the presemantic components of ERPs during a passive reading task and massive repetition used to reduce familiarity effect between words and nonwords. In a second study, the level of familiarity was investigated by varying stimulus repetition and frequency in a lexical decision task. Overall results suggest a functional discrimination between orthographic and nonorthographic stimuli begun as early as 170 ms (N170 component) whereas the next components (N230 and N320) were sensitive to the orthographic nature of the stimuli, but also to their lexical/phonologic proprieties. The N320 associated to phonological processing (Bentin et al., 1999) was modulated by word frequency and massive repetition caused its disappearance. This suggests that this component may reflect a nonobligatory phonologic stage of graphemephoneme conversion postulated by the DRC model (Coltheart et al., 2001) or semantic phonologically mediated pathway (Harm and Seidenberg, in press).

The Homophone Effect in Written French: The Case of Verb-Noun Inflection Errors

Sometimes people miswrite a word that sounds like the target word (e.g. “there” instead of “their”). This homophone effect is interesting in that it is one of the rare cases in which grammatical classes can be violated. In five experiments, we provided evidence that the homophone effect can be experimentally induced in French adults. This effect manifested itself through the occurrence of noun-verb inflection errors. These inflection errors were elicited by presenting subjects with “pronoun1 pronoun2 verb” sentences and asking them to recall these sentences by writing them down. In these sentences, when the verb had a noun homophone whose frequency was higher than that of the verb, the erroneous inflection was most often -s, the plural mark of nouns. The first three experiments showed that this homophone effect was enhanced when working memory was overloaded. The last two experiments showed that the homophone effect increased when the meaning of the noun was primed by a relevant semantic context. The pres...

Behavioral Performances in Participants with Phonological Dyslexia and Different Patterns on the N170 Component.

Adults with phonological dyslexia and controls performed a lexical decision task while ERPs were recorded in the occipitotemporal pathway. Based on N170 durations, two subgroups were formed: dysl1 showing longer N170 durations and dysl2 showing normal N170 durations. While the dysl1 subgroup had poorer accuracy for infrequent words and pseudo-words, the dysl2 group responded more slowly than controls to pseudo-words. N170 amplitudes were larger in the left hemisphere for controls irrespective of items. In the dysl1 subgroup, N170 amplitudes were larger in the left hemisphere than the right for words but not for pseudo-words, a sign of hemispheric compensation, while in the dysl2 subgroup signs of bilateralization were observed. Moreover, in the dysl1 subgroup, P100 amplitudes were smaller than controls. These results indicate different behavioral profiles of dyslexics with different patterns of P100 and N170 components. The ERP changes may be due to different behavioral strategies employed by each subgroup, logographic in dysl2 and phonological in dysl1.

When memorized instances compete with rules : The case of number-noun agreement in written French

It is claimed by Totereau, Thévenin & Fayol (1997) that French children understand the rule for spelling the plural inflection very early on. However, no evidence contradicts the alternative that they learn the spelling of a words singular and plural forms by treating the two forms as entirely different words. We tested this by asking French first and second graders (85 six-year-old and 89 seven-year-old children, respectively) to read and write rare words, either in just the singular or in just the plural, and then testing their spelling. The children tended to attach plural inflections to words which they had encountered only as plural and to omit them from words encountered before only as singular.

Orthographic Revision: The Case of Subject-Verb Agreement in French

The chapter presents two experiments carried out on orthographic revision with children and adults. The first experiment aims to investigate the stage during which ‘rule proceduralization’, with regard to subject-verb agreement, occurs. On analysing the performance obtained from primary school children in two types of tasks: (1) to agree a dictated verb in context; (2) to detect and correct an error involving this kind of agreement, we found that there is a period (second and third years of primary school) during which children prove to be more able to detect and correct an agreement error, than to produce this agreement during writing. These results are explained in terms of the cognitive cost difference between these activities. The second research aims to study development of expertise in the detection of such agreement errors. Analysis of the performance of primary and secondary school children and adults, in a task consisting in detecting agreement errors in sentences presented one by one on a computer screen, reveals an expert profile of error detection, certainly due to an implicit learning of spatial cooccurrences between morphemes. From the point of view of the cognitive processes involved in production and revising, these results allow discussion, on the one hand, of the phenomenon of knowledge proceduralization (automatization of agreement processing for writing; automatization of agreement error detection processing), and on the other hand, of the role of implicit learning in the management of agreements.

La mémorisation de l’orthographe des mots lus en CM2 : effet du traitement visuel simultané

Resume L’acquisition des connaissances orthographiques lexicales est un processus complexe, encore mal compris. Cette acquisition se fait en grande partie de facon implicite au cours de la lecture. Elle dependrait alors de la qualite du decodage et d’autres facteurs restant a preciser. Des donnees theoriques et certains premiers resultats empiriques suggerent que le traitement visuel simultane de toutes les lettres du mot est un facteur important pour l’acquisition de son orthographe specifique. L’etude presentee ici vise a verifier cette hypothese en fin d’ecole primaire et avec differents delais entre lecture du mot et test orthographique. Lors d’une phase de lecture, on manipule la possibilite pour les participants de traiter toutes les lettres des mots simultanement. La reconnaissance de l’orthographe des mots est ensuite evaluee apres un delai de un ou sept jours. Les resultats confirment que la possibilite de prise d’information simultanee du mot entier pendant la lecture favorise la memorisation de son orthographe, quel que soit le delai de restitution.

L’effet d’une induction émotionnelle par la musique sur la production des accords nominal et verbal : étude chez l’enfant d’école primaire

Resume Cette etude a pour but d’etudier l’effet d’une induction emotionnelle par la musique sur les performances orthographiques grammaticales d’enfants de CM1 et CM2. En reference au modele d’Ellis et Moore (1999), l’emotion, positive ou negative, impacterait les performances cognitives en privant l’individu d’une partie de ses ressources attentionnelles. L’acte d’orthographier repose sur des processus de differentes natures, plus ou moins couteux en ressources attentionnelles. Ainsi, l’effet de l’emotion devrait etre differencie selon le cout attentionnel de l’accord a realiser et le niveau d’expertise du scripteur. Les resultats revelent un impact negatif de l’induction emotionnelle negative sur les performances orthographiques grammaticales. Cet effet est differencie selon le type d’accord (nominal vs. verbal) a mettre en œuvre et le niveau orthographique des enfants.