Séverine Casalis

Morphological Analysis, Phonological Analysis and Learning To Read French: A Longitudinal Study.

This paper presents a longitudinal study, from kindergarten to secondgrade, which aims to examine the relationship between morphologicalanalysis, phonological analysis and learning to read. Three phonologicalawareness tasks, five derivational and four inflectional subtests wereadministered to fifty children at each of the three levels. Evolution ofperformance was analyzed through the three years. Data showed that withthe exception of two subtests, performance increased from kindergarten tofirst grade and from first grade to second grade, without reaching ceilingperformance in second grade, at least for morphological subtests. Linksbetween morphological and phonological analyses were very strong: inparticular, syllable segmentation was highly correlated with themorphological subtests in kindergarten while phonemic segmentation wascorrelated with morphological subtests in first and second grade. Therewere also strong links between morphological analysis and reading.Regression analyses showed that while phonological awarenessexplained a major part of variance in first grade, both phonologicaland morphological scores explained significant part of variance of bothdecoding and comprehension reading scores in second grade. Thus, thislongitudinal study contributes to the evidence of a link between bothphonological and morphological analysis and learning to read French.

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.

How specific is the connection between morphological awareness and spelling? A study of French children.

This study examined the relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. We show that French children in Grades 3 and 4 appear to use morphological information in spelling; spelling of sounds for which there are several alternatives was more accurate in derived than in nonderived words. The link between morphological awareness and spelling seems to be general, given that morphological awareness correlated with multiple spelling scores, including those that did not involve morphology. Further, the relationship between spelling and morphological awareness seems to be affected by both the developmental level of the child and the phonological structure of the items in the morphological awareness task. We discuss the implications of this research for clarifying the relationship between morphological awareness and spelling.

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 and spelling acquisition in French first graders: Longitudinal evidence

This study was aimed at investigating the development of reading and spelling skills in French. First graders were tested twice (in February and in June). Phonological mediation was expected to play a major role at the beginning of reading and spelling acquisition, and thus a regularity effect was predicted. Under the assumption that alphabetical processing is primarily sequential, i.e. letter by letter, a complexity effect was predicted as well. In other words, subjects would read and spell words containing one-letter graphemes more accurately than words containing multi-letter graphemes. Further, processing was assumed to be strictly alphabetical at the beginning of acquisition, no frequency effect was expected. Overall, the role of phonological mediation is confirmed. A complexity effect testifying to sequential alphabetic processing was observed for spelling but not for reading. The hypothesis of a strict reliance on alphabetical processing is not confirmed since a frequency effect was observed in both reading and spelling. These findings are discussed in the light of the Frith, Morton, and Seymour models.

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.

Neuropsychological Profile on the WISC-IV of French Children With Dyslexia

This study examined the pattern of results on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV; French version) for 60 French children with dyslexia, from 8 to 16 years of age. Although use of WISC-III failed to clearly identify typical profiles and cognitive deficits in dyslexia, WISC-IV offers an opportunity to reach these objectives with new indexes and subtests. The mean performance analysis showed a Working Memory Index (WMI) at a limit level, significantly lower compared to the three other indexes. The WMI was the lowest index for 68% of the population studied and was significantly weaker for children with phonological dyslexia compared to children with surface dyslexia. WISC-IV evidenced preserved language and reasoning abilities in contrast to limited verbal working memory efficiency. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.

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.

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.