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Activation of syllable units during visual recognition of French words in Grade 2*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2008

FABIENNE CHETAIL  and
STEPHANIE MATHEY
FABIENNE CHETAIL*
Affiliation:
Université Bordeaux 2, Bordeaux
STEPHANIE MATHEY
Affiliation:
Université Bordeaux 2, Bordeaux
*
Address for correspondence: Fabienne Chetail, Département de Psychologie, Université Bordeaux 2, 3ter Place de la Victoire, 33076 Bordeaux cedex, France. Tel:+33.5.57.57.18.00. Fax: +33.5.57.57.19.77. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The aim of the study was to investigate the syllable activation hypothesis in French beginning readers. Second graders performed a lexical decision task in which bisyllabic words were presented in two colours that either matched the syllable boundaries or not. The data showed that the children were sensitive to syllable match and to syllable complexity. In addition, good readers were slowed down while poor readers were speeded up by syllable match. These findings suggest that syllables are functional units of lexical access in children and that syllable activation is influenced by reading level.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 4 , September 2009 , pp. 883 - 894
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by an MESR grant to the first author. We are grateful to the students, teachers and head teachers at the St. Seurin, Notre Dame and Sévigné schools for their participation. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

References

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