Loury, F. , Simoës-Perlant, A. & Soum-Favaro, C.
Université Toulouse II-Le Mirail (laboratoire Octogone-Lordat)
The goal of this study is to understand mental representations and cognitive mechanisms involved in writing. More precisely, the role of syllables in children's segmentation process of oral forms in dictation tasks will be assessed. The effects of syllables have been debated, primarily as far as reading: effects of syllabic frequency (Magnan & Ecalle, 1998) and of syllabic structure, both in terms of congruence (Cole et al, 1999) and syllabic complexity (Sprenger - Charolles & Siegel, 1997). While writing under dictation, Soum et al. (in press) revealed that the context of liaison causes written segmentation mistakes for children in cycle 2 due to syllabic misalignment: liaisons lead to disassociation between word boundaries and syllable boundaries (e.g., "un petit tunivers" instead of "un petit univers"). Small work has been done on written language disorders and access to syllables. However, it appears that as far as reading, even if dyslexic children have difficulties accessing phonetic representations of language, they are sensitive syllabic structures and frequency (Maïonchi-Pino, 2008). This study considers writing, by asking thirty children with developmental dyslexia a dictation task. Forty eight experimental stimuli were divided into three blocs corresponding to the three most common consonants in liaison: /n/, /z/ and /t/. For each consonant, there are two modes: in a liaison context (e.g., un petit univers) or at the beginning of a word (e.g., un petit tunnel). The children were to write each stimulus they heard on a page of a notebook. Each child would hear the stimulus twice before writing. If dyslexic children align the syllable with the beginning of the word to segment the oral extract, then liaisons should hinder lexical access and the results would demonstrate that syllables are relevant treatment language units. The results are currently being analyzed.