In this study we asked whether nonwords created by transposing two phonemes (/biks[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) are perceived as being more similar to their base words (/bisk[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) than nonwords created by substituting two phonemes (/bipf[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/). Using the short-term phonological priming and a…

Skilled readers have developed a certain amount of tolerance to variations in the visual form of words (e.g., CAPTCHAs, handwritten text, etc.). To examine how visual distortion affects the mapping from the visual input onto abstract word representations during normal reading, we focused on a single type of distortion: letter rotation.…

Purpose: An increasing number of individuals with residual or even normal contralateral hearing are being considered for cochlear implantation. It remains unknown whether the presence of contralateral hearing is beneficial or detrimental to their perceptual learning of cochlear implant (CI)--processed speech. The aim of this experiment was to…

The processing of time activates a spatial left-to-right mental timeline, where past events are "located" to the left and future events to the right. If past and future words activate this mental timeline, then the processing of such words should interfere with hand movements that go in the opposite direction. To test this hypothesis, we…

Purpose: Children are assumed to acquire orthographic representations during autonomous reading by decoding new written words. The present study investigates how deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children build new orthographic representations compared to typically hearing (TH) children. Method: Twenty-nine DHH children, from 7.8 to 13.5 years old,…

Previous studies indicate that children are exposed to different literacy experiences at home. Although these disparities have been shown to affect children's literacy skills, it remains unclear whether and how home literacy practices influence brain activity underlying word-level reading. In the present study, we asked parents of French children…

The present study examined transposed-word effects in a same-different matching task with sequences of 5 words. The word sequences were presented one after the other, each for 400 ms, the first in lowercase and the second in uppercase. The first sequence, the reference, was either a grammatically correct sentence or a scrambled ungrammatical…

During spoken word processing, native (L1) listeners use allophonic variation to predictively rule out word competitors and speed up word recognition. There is some evidence that second language (L2) learners develop an awareness of allophonic distributions in their L2, but whether they use their knowledge to facilitate word recognition online,…

Children develop early literacy and numeracy skills from an early age. The primary aim of the current study is to examen links between early literacy skills and early numeracy skills during preschool education in France. This study involves 313 kindergarten students (152 girls and 161 boys), aged between 3.44 and 7.02 years (mean age = 5.07 years,…

Two masked priming experiments investigated the impact of prime lexicality (word vs. nonword) and the pseudo-morphological structure of prime stimuli (pseudosuffixed vs. nonsuffixed) on embedded word priming effects. In the related prime conditions, target words were embedded at the beginning of prime stimuli and were followed either by a…

The aim of this study is to propose advantages provided by computerized tools when assessing reading ability. A new computer-based reading assessment evaluating both word reading and reading comprehension processes was administered to 687 children in primary (N=400) and secondary (N=287) schools. Accuracy (weighted scores) and speed of access…

Purpose: Multiple factors impact reading acquisition in individuals with reading disability, including genetic disorders such as Williams syndrome (WS). Despite a relative strength in oral language, individuals with WS usually have an intellectual disability and tend to display deficits in areas associated with reading. There is substantial…

A letter-search task was used to test the hypothesis that affixes are chunked during morphological processing and that such chunking might operate differently for prefixes and suffixes. Participants had to detect a letter target that was embedded either in a prefix or suffix (e.g., "R" in "propoint" or "filmure") or…

There is agreement that French typically reading children use syllable-sized units to segment words. Although the statistical properties of the initial syllables or the clusters within syllable boundaries seem to be crucial for syllable segmentation, little is known about the role of consonant sonority in silent reading. In two experiments that…

The present study was aimed at testing the locus of word frequency effects in spelling to dictation: Are they located at the level of spoken word recognition (Chua & Rickard Liow, 2014) or at the level of the orthographic output lexicon (Delattre, Bonin, & Barry, 2006)? Words that varied on objective word frequency and on phonological…