Biomedical subjects

Pascale Colé

Publications and source records attributed to Pascale Colé.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Differing sequences of metaphonological development in French and English.

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable --> onset-rime --> phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a child's native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English speakers aged 4;11 (N = 10), 5;3 (N = 21), and 6;5 (N = 23) and French speakers aged 5;6 (N = 35), and 6;8 (N = 34). Experiment 2 assesses performance in the common unit task using English speakers aged 4;7 (N = 22), 5;7 (N = 23), and 6;11 (N = 22), and French speakers aged 4;7 (N = 20), 5;6 (N = 35), and 6;7 (N = 33). The experiments reveal crosslinguistic differences in the processing of syllables prior to school entry with French speakers exhibiting a greater consistency in manipulating syllables. Phoneme awareness emerges in both languages once reading instruction is introduced and rime awareness appears to follow rather than precede this event. Thus, the emergence of phonological awareness did not show a universal pattern but rather was subject to the influence of both native language and literacy.

Age Factors↗

PubMed2004

Morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia.

This study examines morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia. While the poor phonological awareness of dyslexic children has been related to their difficulty in handling the alphabetical principle, less is known about their morphological awareness, which also plays an important part in reading development. The aim of this study was to analyze in more detail the implications of the phonological impairments of dyslexics in dealing with larger units of language such as morphemes. First, the performance of dyslexic children in a series of morphological tasks was compared with the performance of children matched on reading-level and chronological age. In all the tasks, the dyslexic group performed below the chronological age control group, suggesting that morphological awareness cannot be developed entirely independently of reading experience and/or phonological skills. Comparisons with the reading-age control group indicated that, while the dyslexic children were poorer in the morphemic segmentation tasks, they performed normally for their reading level in the sentence completion tasks. Furthermore, they produced more derived words in the production task. This suggests that phonological impairments prevent the explicit segmentation of affixes while allowing the development of productive morphological knowledge. A second study compared dyslexic subgroups defined by their degree of phonological impairment. Our results suggest that dyslexics develop a certain type of morphological knowledge which they use as a compensatory reading strategy.

Attention↗

PubMed2004

MANULEX: a grade-level lexical database from French elementary school readers.

This article presents MANULEX, a Web-accessible database that provides grade-level word frequency lists of nonlemmatized and lemmatized words (48,886 and 23,812 entries, respectively) computed from the 1.9 million words taken from 54 French elementary school readers. Word frequencies are provided for four levels: first grade (G1), second grade (G2), third to fifth grades (G3-5), and all grades (G1-5). The frequencies were computed following the methods described by Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971) and Zeno, Ivenz, Millard, and Duvvuri (1995), with four statistics at each level (F, overall word frequency; D, index of dispersion across the selected readers; U, estimated frequency per million words; and SFI, standard frequency index). The database also provides the number of letters in the word and syntactic category information. MANULEX is intended to be a useful tool for studying language development through the selection of stimuli based on precise frequency norms. Researchers in artificial intelligence can also use it as a source of information on natural language processing to simulate written language acquisition in children. Finally, it may serve an educational purpose by providing basic vocabulary lists.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Effect of grammatical gender on visual word recognition: evidence from lexical decision and eye movement experiments.

Lexical decision times and eye movements were recorded to determine whether grammatical gender can influence the visual recognition of isolated French nouns. This issue was investigated by assessing the use of two types of regularities between a noun's form and its gender--namely ending-to-gender regularities (e.g., the final letter sequence -at appears only in masculine nouns and, thus, is predictive of masculine gender) and gender-to-ending regularities (e.g., feminine gender would predict the final letter e, whereas masculine gender would not). Previous studies have shown that noun endings are used by readers when they have to identify gender. However, the influence of ending-to-gender predictiveness has never been investigated in a lexical decision task, and the effect of gender-to-ending regularities has never been evaluated at all. The results suggest that gender information can influence both the activation stage (Experiments 1 and 3) and the selection stage (Experiments 2 and 3) of the word recognition process.

Adult↗