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…