Children with specific language impairment (SLI) who show impaired phonological processing are at risk of developing reading disabilities, which raises the question of phonological impairment commonality between developmental dyslexia (DD) and SLI. In order to distinguish the failing phonological processes in SLI and DD, we investigated the different steps involved in speech processing going from perceptual discrimination through various aspects of phonological memory. Our results show that whereas the memory for sequence is likewise impaired in either disorder, children with SLI have to face additional impairment in phonological discrimination and short-term memory, which may account for even poorer phonological awareness than dyslexics'.
The acquisition of reading skills is known to rely on early phonological abilities, but only a few studies have investigated the independent contribution of the different steps involved in phonological processing. This 1-year longitudinal study, spanning the initial year of reading instruction, aimed at specifying the development of phonological discrimination, awareness and various aspects of phonological memory and at assessing their respective contributions to early reading acquisition. Our results show an increase in performance at each phonological processing step, but also suggest a qualitative evolution in their relative importance. Hierarchical regression analyses indicate that reading skills are mainly predicted by phonological awareness measured at the kindergarten stage and, subsequently, by phonological memory abilities measured at the end of first grade. More precisely short-term memory for serial-order information seems to contribute to the development of decoding abilities, while phonological knowledge stored in long-term memory seems to influence word recognition.The early stages of the acquisition of reading skills require learning of the correspondence between the visual and auditory forms of verbal units, that is between letters and sounds (Ehri, 1995). Learning grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (GPC) rules requires the ability to perceive, segment and explicitly manipulate the sounds of spoken words, an ability generally referred to as phonological awareness, which calls for full awareness of the phonological structure of speech (Gombert, 1992;Stuart, 2005). When decoding a word, the sequence of phonemes resulting from GPC has to be held in some form of short-term buffer in order to be assembled and then matched to phonological lexical representations stored in long-term memory, each step relying on phonological memory (Gathercole, 1995). Phonological awareness and phonological
We investigated how subjects used their knowledge of biomechanical constraints when judging whether different items were in balance or in the process of falling, as a function of their angle of slant. In the first experiment, the stimuli were pictures of postures of a human body, of a wooden mannequin, and of a skeleton. The results show that for these 3 items, fall responses appeared for a smaller slant angle for a backward slant than for a forward one. This difference may reflect the influence of biomechanical constraints. To verify whether the asymmetry of the responses to the mannequin and the skeleton was genuine or due to some semantic context effect, a second experiment was run with only pictures of a wooden mannequin. The same asymmetry was observed. In a third experiment, falling judgments were obtained for pictures of a human body and of a structurally comparable artifactual object. The asymmetry of the fall responses appeared only for the human body.
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