Maïonchi-Pino N, de Cara B, Écalle J, Magnan A. Are French dyslexic children sensitive to consonant sonority in segmentation strategies? Preliminary evidence from a letter detection task.
RESEARCH IN DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES 2012;
33:12-23. [PMID:
22093643 DOI:
10.1016/j.ridd.2011.07.045]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/26/2011] [Revised: 07/29/2011] [Accepted: 07/29/2011] [Indexed: 05/31/2023]
Abstract
This paper aims to investigate whether--and how--consonant sonority (obstruent vs. sonorant) and status (coda vs. onset) within syllable boundaries modulate the syllable-based segmentation strategies. Here, it is questioned whether French dyslexic children, who experience acoustic-phonetic (i.e., voicing) and phonological impairments, are sensitive to an optimal 'sonorant coda-obstruent onset' sonority profile as a cue for a syllable-based segmentation. To examine these questions, we used a modified version of the illusory conjunction paradigm with French dyslexic children compared with both chronological age-matched and reading level-matched controls. Our results first showed that the syllable-based segmentation is developmentally constrained in visual identification: in normally reading children, it appears to progressively increase as reading skills increase. However, surprisingly, our results also showed that dyslexic children were able to use syllable-sized units. Then, data highlighted that a syllable-based segmentation in visual identification basically relies on an optimal 'sonorant coda-obstruent onset' sonority profile rather than on phonological and orthographic statistical properties in normally reading children as well as, surprisingly, in dyslexic children. Our results are discussed to support a sonority-modulated prelexical role of syllable-sized units in visual identification in French, even in dyslexic children who exhibited a developmentally delayed profile. We argue that dyslexic children have deficits in online phonetic-phonological processing rather than degraded or underspecified phonetic-phonological representations.
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