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…
Computational evidence that frequency trajectory theory does not oppose but emerges from age-of-acquisition theory.
International audience; According to the age-of-acquisition hypothesis, words acquired early in life are processed faster and more accurately than words acquired later. Connectionist models have begun to explore the influence of the age/order of acquisition of items (and also their frequency of encounter). This study attempts to reconcile two different methodological and theoretical approaches (proposed by Lambon Ralph & Ehsan, 2006 and Zevin & Seidenberg, 2002) to age-limited learning effects. The current simulations extend the findings reported by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002) that have shown that frequency trajectories (FTs) have limited and specific effects on word-reading tasks. Using th…
Normes d’associations verbales pour 520 mots concrets et étude de leurs relations avec d’autres variables psycholinguistiques
Resume Cet article presente un nouvel ensemble de normes d’associations verbales pour 520 noms concrets du francais. Les normes d’associations verbales sont utiles pour l’etude des processus fondamentaux et representations en jeu dans les habiletes memorielles, de comprehension et production du langage. Les relations qu’entretiennent les normes d’associations verbales avec d’autres variables psycholinguistiques sont analysees. Aussi la stabilite des normes d’associations verbales a-t-elle ete etudiee sur un sous-ensemble de mots de l’etude de Ferrand et Alario (1998). Parmi les principaux resultats, il apparait que : 1. les items se repartissent en trois grands ensembles relativement distin…
At what age did you learn ‘Dog’, ‘Harp’ and other words that you know? The issue of what adult age of acquisition (AoA) estimates really measure
International audience
Sequential Effects of Phonological Priming in Visual Word Recognition
International audience; Two masked priming experiments were conducted to examine phonological priming of bisyllabic words in French, and in particular, whether it operates sequentially or in parallel. Bisyllabic target words were primed by pseudowords that shared either the first or the second phonological syllable of the target. Overlap of the first syllable only-not the second-produced facilitation in both the lexical decision and the naming tasks. These findings suggest that, for polysyllabic words, phonological codes are computed sequentially during silent reading and reading aloud.
MEGALEX- A new mega-study of visual word recognition: Some preliminary data
International audience
MEGALEX: A new mega-study of visual and auditory word recognition in French
International audience; We present a new mega-study (called MEGALEX) involving the collection of visual and auditory lexical decision data for 28,000 French words and the same number of pseudowords. This new mega-study applied the repeated measures design developed by Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, and Brysbaert (2012). For each modality tested (visual vs. auditory), two groups of 40 participants each responded to 14,000 words and the same number of pseudowords for a total duration of 20h (divided over multiple sessions). Collected reaction times were submitted to multiple regression analyses in order to study the influence of continuous lexical variables such as word frequency, word length (in l…
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, …
Smart Phone, Smart Science: How the Use of Smartphones Can Revolutionize Research in Cognitive Science
WOS:000295936900019; International audience; Investigating human cognitive faculties such as language, attention, and memory most often relies on testing small and homogeneous groups of volunteers coming to research facilities where they are asked to participate in behavioral experiments. We show that this limitation and sampling bias can be overcome by using smartphone technology to collect data in cognitive science experiments from thousands of subjects from all over the world. This mass coordinated use of smartphones creates a novel and powerful scientific "instrument" that yields the data necessary to test universal theories of cognition. This increase in power represents a potential re…