Lexical-semantic reading in a shallow orthography: evidence from a girl with Williams Syndrome

Abstract

The reading skills of a girl with Williams Syndrome are assessed by a timed word-naming task. To test the efficiency of lexical and nonlexical reading, we considered four marker effects: Lexicality (better reading of words than nonwords), frequency (better reading of high than low frequency words), length (better reading of short than long words), and contextuality (better reading of words with one-toone grapheme-to-phoneme mapping than words with context-sensitive graphemes). Results suggested that this girl has failed to develop efficient orthography-to-phonology mappings and is dependent upon a lexical-semantic reading procedure in which a word's pronunciation is activated after its meaning is obtained.

Tracking Second Thoughts: Continuous and Discrete Revision Processes during Visual Lexical Decision

“…Our results speak also specifically to psycholinguistic studies and models, which have so far neglected or at least rarely investigated the on-line dynamics of lexical decisions [ 1 , 2 ]. By using a continuous measure of performance [ 4 – 7 , 29 ] we have mapped choice uncertainty into different parameters of the movement (curvature, velocity and acceleration profile) and not only on reaction time as usually done.…”

“…Lexical decisions have been extensively studied in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, but most studies focused on the analysis of response time under different conditions (e.g., lexical vs. non-lexical stimuli) (see [ 1 , 2 ]). Recent studies using continuous kinematic measures (i.e., measuring eye or mouse movements during the choice) permitted to shed light on the dynamic properties of the moment-to-moment decision process and have been applied to a number of paradigms that include numerical and colour comparisons, categorization of ambiguous figures, and semantic categorization, among others [ 3 – 7 ].…”

Unfolding Visual Lexical Decision in Time

“…faster and more accurate responses in processing words than nonwords) has been assessed in numerous psycholinguistic studies. In reading aloud Italian stimuli words are named faster than nonwords, regardless of their frequency (high or low) or list composition (pure vs. mixed blocks) [1] , or the readers' expertise [2] . In lexical decision tasks, when participants are required to briefly categorize items presented as words or nonwords, the Lexicality effect should be attenuated if the comparison is made between extremely lexical items (i.e., high frequency words) and extremely nonlexical items (i.e., strings of consonants), because the discrimination between stimuli does not require in-depth analysis but can be based on the visual processing of items [3] .…”

Rôle des habiletés visuospatiales dans l’apprentissage de la lecture : cas du syndrome de Williams

“…Cette récupération rend la lecture plus rapide et plus efficace (notamment pour la lecture des mots irréguliers familiers). Différentes recherches confirment chez les personnes SW la pertinence de ce modèle à double voie (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon et Ziegler, 2001) dans la compréhension des stratégies mises en oeuvre par les lecteurs (Barca, Bello, Volterra et Burani, 2010;Castles, Bates, Coltheart, Luciano et Martin, 2006;Ziegler et al, 2008).…”

“…En effet, il est démontré qu'au cours d'un suivi longitudinal de 23 jeunes adultes SW d'âge moyen de 21 ans et 9 mois, il existe une amélioration relative du niveau de lecture au cours du développement, soulignant des capacités d'apprentissage (Udwin, Davies et Howlin, 1996). Cependant, leurs performances aux tâches d'évaluation des compétences en lecture demeurent toujours inférieures à celles de contrôles de même âge chronologique (Pagon, Bennett, LaVeck, Stewart et Johnson, 1987), mais équivalentes aux contrôles de même âge mental (Barca, Bello, Volterra et Burani, 2010;Garayzábal et Cuetos, 2008;Howlin, Davies et Udwin, 1998;Laing, Hulme, Grant et Karmiloff-Smith, 2001) et de même âge de lecture (Menghini, Verucci et Vicari, 2004;Steele, Scerif, Cornish et Karmiloff-Smith, 2013 Garayzábal et Cuetos (2008) indiquent que ceux-ci ont des performances similaires à leur âge mental en termes de précision, mais qu'ils sont plus lents dans la lecture des mots et des pseudo-mots. L'étude de cas de Barca, Bello, Volterra et Burani (2010), réalisée avec une adolescente de 13 ans et 8 mois, indique un niveau de précision en lecture proche de celui d'enfants de 8-9 ans, mais un temps de lecture plus important.…”