Are French dyslexic children sensitive to consonant sonority in segmentation strategies? Preliminary evidence from a letter detection task

Maïonchi-Pino, Norbert; Cara, Bruno De; Écalle, Jean; Magnan, Annie

doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.07.045

Cited by 23 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Dyslexics' full sensitivity to the structure of onset clusters agrees with past studies of heterosyllabic clusters (e.g., alba vs. abla; Fabre & Bedoin, 2003;Maïonchi-Pino et al, 2012), onset clusters (Maïonchi-Pino et al, 2013) and other phonological restrictions on assimilation (Blomert et al, 2004;Szenkovits et al, 2011), and identical consonants (Berent, Vaknin-Nusbaum, et al, 2012). In all cases, dyslexics exhibited intact sensitivity to grammatical phonological constraints.…”

Section: Conclusion and Conundrumssupporting

confidence: 85%

Phonological generalizations in dyslexia: The phonological grammar may not be impaired

Berent

Vaknin‐Nusbaum

Balaban

et al. 2013

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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Dyslexia is commonly attributed to a phonological deficit, but whether it effectively compromises the phonological grammar or lower level systems is rarely explored. To address this question, we gauge the sensitivity of dyslexics to grammatical phonological restrictions on spoken onset clusters (e.g., bl in block). Across languages, certain onsets are preferred to others (e.g., blif ≻ bnif ≻ bdif, where ≻ indicates a preference). Here, we show that dyslexic participants (adult native speakers of Hebrew) are fully sensitive to these phonological restrictions, and they extend them irrespective of whether the onsets are attested in their language (e.g., bnif vs. bdif) or unattested (e.g., mlif vs. mdif). Dyslexics, however, showed reduced sensitivity to phonetic contrasts (e.g., blif vs. belif; ba vs. pa). Together, these results suggest that the known difficulties of dyslexics in speech processing could emanate not from the phonological grammar, but rather from lower level impairments to acoustic/phonetic encoding, lexical storage, and retrieval.

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Section: Conclusion and Conundrumssupporting

confidence: 85%

Phonological generalizations in dyslexia: The phonological grammar may not be impaired

Berent

Vaknin‐Nusbaum

Balaban

et al. 2013

Cognitive Neuropsychology

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“…Illusory conjunction studies clearly show that readers parse written words into letter groups that form phonological syllables in the first steps of word perception, at least in French (Doignon & Zagar, 2005) and in English (Prinzmetal et al , 1986; Rapp, 1992). Similar results have been found in French beginning readers (Doignon & Zagar, 2006; Maïonchi-Pino, De Cara, Ecalle & Magnan, 2012a) and dyslexics (Fabre & Bedoin, 2003; Maïonchi-Pino, de Cara, Ecalle & Magnan, 2012b; but see Doignon-Camus, Seigneuric, Perrier, Sisti & Zagar, 2013). In addition to these illusory conjunction studies reporting that syllables are perceptive units, another set of studies clearly show that syllables are functional units of word processing in French beginning readers.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 77%

“…Similar results have been reported with French beginning readers and have showed that children are sensitive to the frequency of letter cluster in letter strings, from the first year of reading acquisition (Doignon & Zagar, 2006). Children were able to use statistical orthographic properties to parse words into syllables, but the effects of such properties were not systematic (Maïonchi-Pino et al , 2012a, 2012b). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The syllabic bridge: the first step in learning spelling-to-sound correspondences*

Doignon-Camus

Zagar

2013

J. Child Lang.

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It is widely agreed that learning to read starts with the establishment of letter-to-phoneme correspondences. However, it is also widely agreed that prereaders do not have access to phoneme units. Here we show that the building of associations between letters and syllables, which we call the ‘syllabic bridge’, might be a faster and more direct way of learning spelling-to-sound correspondences in French. After a few minutes of exposure, prereaders are able to learn the statistical properties of letter co-occurrences. Statistical learning is boosted by explicit instructions about the associations between letter clusters and syllables. Building the syllabic bridge from available phonological syllables and frequent letter clusters may therefore be the first step in learning to read.

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“…These results suggest that a precursor of the universal sonority-related preferences seen in adults (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18) is present close to birth.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 66%

“…This phenomenon has been documented in numerous languages with both isolated syllables [e.g., English (12)(13)(14), French (15), Hebrew (16), Korean (17)] and continuous artificial speech (18). Crucially, these effects occur even if the specific syllables under investigation are unattested in the native language of participants (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). These findings open up the possibility that the SSP might not be induced from linguistic experience.…”

mentioning

confidence: 70%

Language universals at birth

Gómez

Berent

Benavides-Varela

et al. 2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The evolution of human languages is driven both by primitive biases present in the human sensorimotor systems and by cultural transmission among speakers. However, whether the design of the language faculty is further shaped by linguistic biological biases remains controversial. To address this question, we used near-infrared spectroscopy to examine whether the brain activity of neonates is sensitive to a putatively universal phonological constraint. Across languages, syllables like blif are preferred to both lbif and bdif. Newborn infants (2-5 d old) listening to these three types of syllables displayed distinct hemodynamic responses in temporal-perisylvian areas of their left hemisphere. Moreover, the oxyhemoglobin concentration changes elicited by a syllable type mirrored both the degree of its preference across languages and behavioral linguistic preferences documented experimentally in adulthood. These findings suggest that humans possess early, experience-independent, linguistic biases concerning syllable structure that shape language perception and acquisition.human newborns | speech perception | NIRS | sonority | phonology

show abstract

Are French dyslexic children sensitive to consonant sonority in segmentation strategies? Preliminary evidence from a letter detection task

Cited by 23 publications

References 55 publications

Phonological generalizations in dyslexia: The phonological grammar may not be impaired

Phonological generalizations in dyslexia: The phonological grammar may not be impaired

The syllabic bridge: the first step in learning spelling-to-sound correspondences*

Language universals at birth

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