Phonological mediation, and semantic and orthographic factors in silent reading in French

Liliane Sprenger-Charolles (1) , Linda S Siegel (2) , Danièle Béchennec (1)

1 LEAPLCE - Laboratoire d'études sur l'acquisition et la pathologie du langage chez l'enfant
2 UBC - University of British Columbia

The objectives of this series of three studies were to evaluate, first, whether French-speaking children mainly use phonological mediation in the first stage of reading acquisition in a silent reading task and, second, to examine the role of phonological processing in the construction of the orthographic lexicon. Forty-eight French children were followed from kindergarten to the end of second grade. Their phonological skills were assessed using a semantic categorization task with homophone and visual foils (first study); their orthographic skills were assessed by a choice task between a correct exemplar, a homophone, and a visual foil (second study). In the semantic categorization task the differences between the visual and homophone foils increased with time as the homophone foils were more and more likely to be chosen. In the orthographic choice task, performance improved with time, but errors were more likely to involve homophone foils. The results obtained by two subgroups of children who differed in their level of orthographic expertise at the end of second grade (third study) indicated that, one year earlier (at the end of first grade) the future "expert" spellers were more likely to use phonological processing in silent reading (semantic categorization task) than the future "poor" spellers. Moreover, in first grade, future spelling experts had better phonological skills in reading aloud and in spelling from dictation (pseudoword tasks) than the future poor spellers and they also had better phonological awareness skills at the beginning of the last year of kindergarten. These results suggest that French-speaking children use phonological mediation in silent reading tasks and that phonological processing contributes to the construction of the orthographic lexicon.

Domaines: Linguistique; Psychologie

Liliane Sprenger-Charolles, Linda S Siegel, Danièle Béchennec. Phonological mediation, and semantic and orthographic factors in silent reading in French. Scientific Study of Reading, 1998, 2, pp.3-29. ⟨hal-00733578⟩