0000000000334631
AUTHOR
Norbert Maïonchi-pino
Universal Restrictions in Reading: What Do French Beginning Readers (Mis)perceive?
International audience; Despite the many reports that consider statistical distribution to be vitally important in visual identification tasks in children, some recent studies suggest that children do not always rely on statistical properties to help them locate syllable boundaries. Indeed, sonority-a universal phonological element-might be a reliable source for syllable segmentation. More specifically, are children sensitive to a universal phonological sonority-based markedness continuum within the syllable boundaries for segmentation (e.g., from marked, illegal intervocalic clusters, "jr," to unmarked, legal intervocalic clusters, "rj"), and how does this sensitivity progress with reading…
Sonority as a Phonological Cue in Early Perception of Written Syllables in French
Many studies focused on the letter and sound co-occurrences to account for the well-documented syllable-based effects in French in visual (pseudo)word processing. Although these language-specific statistical properties are crucial, recent data suggest that studies that go all-in on phonological and orthographic regularities may be misguided in interpreting how—and why—readers locate syllable boundaries and segment clusters. Indeed, syllable-based effects could depend on more abstract, universal phonological constraints that rule and govern how letter and sound occur and co-occur, and readers could be sensitive to sonority—a universal phonological element—for processing (pseudo)words. Here, …