This study aimed to establish normative data for 145 words using phonological and semantic association tasks with 242 French schoolchildren, ranging from ages 5 (Grande Section) to 8 (Cours Elémentaire 2), providing a fundamental resource for future research and educational planning. The participants were engaged in two primary tasks: a free…

In the present study, the frequency effect was examined specifically in text reading in developing and expert readers. Third graders, fifth graders, and expert readers read the same short text containing high- and low-frequency words while their eye movements were recorded. The frequency effect was observed in temporal and spatial measures of eye…

Recent research investigating embedded stem priming effects with the masked priming paradigm and pseudoword primes (e.g., "quickify"--"quick") has shown that priming effects can be obtained even when the embedded target word is followed by a non-morphological ending (e.g., "quickald"--"quick"). Here we…

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…

Although the word-frequency effect is one of the most established findings in spoken-word recognition, the precise processing locus of this effect is still a topic of debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of the word-frequency effect. In addition, the neighborhood density effect, which is known to…

A lexical decision task was used with a masked priming procedure to investigate whether and to what extent neighborhood distribution influences the effect of prime duration in masked orthographic priming. French word targets had two higher frequency neighbors that were either distributed over two letter positions (e.g., "LOBE/robe-loge")…

In light of the numerous studies on the detection of target letters among adults, it is generally accepted that the missing-letter effect depends both on a given word's frequency in its language and on its role (function vs. content) in a sentence. Following a presentation of several models explaining these observations we analyze the results of a…

This study investigates the syllable's role in the normal reading acquisition of French children at three grade levels (1st, 3rd, and 5th), using a modified version of Cole, Magnan, and Grainger's (1999) paradigm. We focused on the effects of syllable frequency and word frequency. The results suggest that from the first to third years of reading…

This study reports two experiments assessing the spelling performance of French first graders after 3 months and after 9 months of literacy instruction. The participants were asked to spell high and low frequency irregular words (Experiment 1) and pseudowords, some of which had lexical neighbours (Experiment 2). The lexical database which children…

The acquisition of narrative competence in French by an Arabic-speaking migrant worker in interactions with target language speakers was explored, with hypotheses formed about the polyfunctional uses of certain forms to mark the chronology of events in the narrative or to introduce quoted speech. (Author/CB)

This paper concerns the influence of age of acquisition (AoA) in word reading and other tasks, and attempts to develop a number of issues raised by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002). Analyses performed on both rated and objective measures of AoA show that the frequency trajectory of words is a reliable predictor of their order of acquisition, which…

The first of a two-volume study of the relative accessibility of French vocabulary in French-speaking Canada presents statistical data concerning the frequency, distribution, valence, and accessibility of vocabulary related to 16 fundamental centers of interest found in normal conversation. The scope, procedures, and results of the study are…