ABSTRACTThis research assessed phonological and morphological awareness in dyslexic university students. We tested 44 dyslexic university students in phonological and morphological awareness tasks and compared their performances to those of both matched chronological age and matched reading level controls. In the phonological awareness tests, the dyslexic university students performed at the same level as their reading level controls. In contrast, they systematically outperformed their reading level controls in the morphological awareness tasks and almost reached the proficiency level of the chronological age controls. The results show that dyslexic university students develop their morphological awareness more than their phonological awareness. These findings add to the evidence indicating that morphological awareness is not deficient in dyslexia and could instead play a beneficial role in the development of literacy skills in this population.

This article presents the main theoretical hypotheses about the mechanisms of activation and selection in spoken word recognition, and discusses recent experimental data that shed light on these mechanisms. First, the theoretical assumptions relating to the activated lexical candidates are examined, then the results of various studies showing the activation of multiple lexical candidates are presented. Second, we examine various theoretical views on lexical selection, and then present results showing that spoken word recognition is affected by the properties of the set of activated candidates.

Cet article presente les principales hypotheses theoriques concernant les mecanismes d’activation et de selection lexicales lors de la reconnaissance des mots parles, et discute un ensemble de donnees experimentales permettant de mieux caracteriser ces deux operations de base. Dans un premier temps, sont examinees les hypotheses theoriques relatives aux candidats actives, puis sont exposes les resultats de differentes etudes mettant en evidence une activation de multiples candidats lexicaux. Dans un second temps, nous examinons les differentes options theoriques concernant les mecanismes sous-jacents au processus de selection lexicale, puis nous presentons un ensemble de resultats montrant que la reconnaissance d’un mot parle est affectee par les proprietes du jeu de candidats actives.

We report the results of a large-scale picture naming experiment in which we evaluated the potential contribution of nine theoretically relevant factors to naming latencies. The experiment included a large number of items and a large sample of participants. In order to make this experiment as similar as possile to classic picture naming experiments, participants were familiarizedwith the materials during a training session. Speeded naming latencies were determined by a software key on the basis of the digital recording of the responses. The effects of various variables on these latencies were assessed with multiple regression techniques, using a repeated measures design. The interpretation of the observed effects is discussed in relation to previous studies and current views on lexical access during speech production.

We report a study on the spoken production of subject–verb agreement in number by four age groups of normally developing children (between 5 and 8;5) and a group of 8 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI; between 5;4 and 9;4), all French speaking. The production of verb agreement was experimentally elicited by asking children to complete sentence preambles containing a head noun and a potentially attracting ‘local noun’. In contrast to previous studies that focused on attraction with local nouns within the subject constituent (postmodifiers), we also studied attraction with local nouns in structures that are not part of the subject constituent (interpolated adjuncts). In normally developing children, we report that (1) attraction effects appear from early on; (2) singular is produced as the default number until age 7 included; (3) more errors are produced with adjunct structures than with postmodifiers, but only from age 8;5 on. In contrast, even the older SLI children showed no attraction effect, a predominance of the singular as default, no effect of syntactic structure and, more generally, persistent high error rates. The turning point observed between 7 and 8;5 in normal children, characterized by a reduced error rate and a significant effect of syntactic structure, is interpreted as an index of the automatization of agreement. The syntactic structure effect is discussed in terms of the interplay of structural and working memory factors in the computation of long-distance relationships.

This paper presents an exploratory study of the spontaneous production of 11 French children clinically diagnosed as specific language impaired (SLI). In a cross-sectional study of the children under and over 5 years of age, we investigate the production of finite and non-finite verbal forms, of sentences with overt and null subjects, and of pronominal clitics. A comparison between younger and older children with SLI highlights developmental patterns which parallel normal syntactic development in important respects, though at a slower pace. An area of difficulty which clearly persists for the older group involves the domain of pronominal complement clitics.

We report two experiments that assessed the role of orthography in constraining subject-verb agreement in written (Experiment 1) and spoken (Experiment 2) French. We contrasted a condition in which the singular and plural forms of the subject head nouns were homophones but non-homographs (e.g., chanson, song-S, vs. chansons, songs-P) with a condition in which the subject head nouns were homophones and homographs in their singular and plural forms (e.g., refus, refusal-S,P). An effect of the orthographic marking was found in written production but not in oral production. The results, together with our previous findings, suggest modality-specific feedback effects during grammatical encoding: orthographic representations influence written production but morpho-phonological representations influence oral production.

This paper evaluates the relative contribution of two prosodic cues, lengthening and f0 contour, in the processes of speech segmentation and storage of new words.More precisely, we investigate the role of prosodic information in the acquisition by French learners of a mini-language constructed for the experiment.The results show that presence of prosodic information facilitates the speech segmentation and therefore, the acquisition of the new language.Indeed, lengthening or f0 rise on the word final syllable is used by listeners to infer the presence of a boundary.However, the presence of the two cues manipulated does not improve performance; and when only one cue is present, f0 induces slightly more accurate segmentation than lengthening.Finally, the storage of the "stressable" property of the word-final syllables in French is discussed.

Psycholinguistic speech production models assume that lexical stress is stored and accessed separately during phonological encoding. We address the questions of the storage and computation of lexical stress in a case study of an Italian-speaking patient with an impairment of lexical stress assignment in naming, reading, and repeating single words. The patient's stress error pattern and his performance on tasks examining lexical stress in perception suggest an impairment in the retrieval of the stress pattern of irregular words. In contrast, his assignment of stress to nonstored phonological forms suggests that the computation of stress is unimpaired.

Three word-spotting experiments assessed the role of syllable onsets and offsets in lexical segmentation. Participants detected CVC words embedded initially or finally in bisyllabic nonwords with aligned (CVC.CVC) or misaligned (CV.CCVC) syllabic structure. A misalignment between word and syllable onsets (Experiment 1) produced a greater perceptual cost than a misalignment between word and syllable offsets (Experiments 2 and 3). These results suggest that listeners rely on syllable onsets to locate the beginning of words. The implications for theories of lexical access in continuous speech are discussed.