The factors contributing to teacher predictions of spelling ability, and the accuracy of their assessments

In this study, teachers of kindergarten and Grade 1 French-speaking students indicated the likelihood their students would develop later writing difficulties. Results showed that language measures, language background, the education levels of parents, and home literacy practices predicted whether children would be identified as at-risk. Moreover children’s oral language skills accounted for even more of the variance in teacher ratings than other variables. Spelling performance assessed 1-year later from a subset of children indicated that the teacher predictions were accurate. Thus, teachers appear to be an effective source for predicting children’s future literacy performance

How Do French–English Bilinguals Pull Verb Particle Constructions Off? Factors Influencing Second Language Processing of Unfamiliar Structures at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

An important challenge in bilingualism research is to understand the mechanisms underlying sentence processing in a second language and whether they are comparable to those underlying native processing. Here, we focus on verb-particle constructions (VPCs) that are among the most difficult elements to acquire in L2 English. The verb and the particle form a unit, which often has a non-compositional meaning (e.g., look up or chew out), making the combined structure semantically opaque. However, bilinguals with higher levels of English proficiency can develop a good knowledge of the semantic properties of VPCs (Blais and Gonnerman, 2013). A second difficulty is that in a sentence context, the particle can be shifted after the direct object of the verb (e.g., The professor looked it up). The processing is more challenging when the object is long (e.g., The professor looked the student’s last name up). This shifted structure favors syntactic processing at the expense of VPC semantic processing. We sought to determine whether or not bilinguals’ reading time (RT) patterns would be similar to those observed for native monolinguals (Gonnerman and Hayes, 2005) when reading VPCs in sentential contexts. French–English bilinguals were tested for English language proficiency, working memory and explicit VPC semantic knowledge. During a self-paced reading task, participants read 78 sentences with VPCs that varied according to parameters that influence native speakers’ reading dynamics: verb-particle transparency, particle adjacency and length of the object noun phrase (NP; 2, 3, or 5 words). RTs in a critical region that included verbs, NPs and particles were measured. Results revealed that RTs were modulated by participants’ English proficiency, with higher proficiency associated with shorter RTs. Examining participants’ explicit semantic knowledge of VPCs and working memory, only readers with more native-like knowledge of VPCs and a high working memory presented RT patterns that were similar to those of monolinguals. Therefore, given the necessary lexical and computational resources, bilingual processing of novel structures at the syntax-semantics interface follows the principles influencing native processing. The findings are in keeping with theories that postulate similar representations and processing in L1 and L2 modulated by processing difficulty

Development of a tool to screen risk of literacy delays in French-speaking children: PHOPHLO

Literacy is crucial for success, both professionally and personally. Oral language skills are closely related to literacy development in children. When a child has weak oral language skills, they will have difficulty achieving reading and writing competencies within the expected time frame. In this paper, we present results from a longitudinal and cross-sectional study of the relationship between oral language skills in pre-literate children, and one aspect of their literacy skills in early elementary school—specifically, spelling. The study was conducted with French-speaking children and French-language learners from Quebec, a population that has been understudied in this area. We developed a predictive tool that will allow teachers and other professionals to assess oral language skills in young children and to predict those children at risk for literacy difficulties. Specifically, we screened children’s speech perception, speech production, phonological awareness, and morphology production abilities at entry to first grade and predicted spelling skills at the end of second grade. The screening tool that we developed proved to have a sensitivity of 71% and a specificity of 93% as a screen for poor spelling abilities.La littératie est un élément crucial du succès à la fois professionnel et personnel. Les habiletés de langage oral sont intimement liées au développement de la littératie chez les enfants. En effet, lorsqu’un enfant a de faibles habiletés de langage oral, il aura plus de difficulté à développer ses habiletés de lecture et d’écriture dans les délais prévus. Nous présentons les résultats d’une étude longitudinale et transversale qui explore les liens entre les habiletés de langage oral chez des enfants n’ayant pas appris à lire ou à écrire et leurs habiletés de littératie au premier cycle du primaire. Cette étude a été menée auprès d’enfants franco-québécois natifs et non natifs, une population peu étudiée dans ce domaine. Nous avons créé un outil prédictif qui permettra aux enseignants et autres professionnels d’évaluer les habiletés de langage oral des enfants et de prédire ceux qui sont à risque de présenter des difficultés de littératie. Plus spécifiquement, nous avons évalué les habiletés de perception et de production de la parole, de conscience phonologique et de production morphologique d’enfants débutant leur première année du primaire. Nous avons prédit leurs habiletés d’orthographe à la fin de leur deuxième année (fin du premier cycle du primaire). L’outil développé a démontré une sensibilité de 71% et une spécificité de 93% pour dépister les faibles habiletés d’orthographe

Graded morphological processing in French

Understanding how morphologically complex words are processed is crucial to understanding the structure of the mental lexicon. Decomposition accounts of morphological processing receive the most support within the psycholinguistic literature, although some of these accounts have difficulty with words where the morphological status is unclear (e.g., hardly; grocer). These issues of murky morphology may be better accounted for by learning models of processing such as emergentist or discriminative models that derive morphological relationships from semantic and phonologically consistent regularities among words. Graded morphological priming effects have been demonstrated in English which support learning accounts of lexical processing (Gonnerman et al., 2007; Quémart et al., 2018). In this study, we examine semantic similarity and processing of morphologically complex words in Quebec French to determine whether graded effects can be found in other languages, and in particular in a language with a richer morphological system than English. Results reveal graded semantic similarity and graded morphological priming effects supporting an emergentist account of lexical processing

Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: Evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology

Complex words consist of morphemic subunits that can recombine to form other words. Thus midnight is standardly analyzed as consisting of the prefix mid- and stem night, which also occur in words such as midstream and nightly. A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. We investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic, phonological, and orthographic codes. Five cross-modal lexical decision experiments show that the magnitude of priming (e.g., for pairs such as teacher-teach) is affected by the degree of semantic and phonological overlap between words. Crucially, items that are only moderately similar produce intermediate facilitation effects (e.g., latelylate) . This pattern is observed both for words standardly treated as morphologically related (e.g., teacher-teach) and for morphologically unrelated words that exhibit similar degrees of semantic and phonological overlap (e.g., snarl-sneer). The results can be understood in terms of connectionist models employing distributed representations rather than discrete morphemes. Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: Evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology One of the fundamental problems in the study of language is to characterize knowledge of words and how this knowledge is used in comprehension and production. The focus of the present article is on derivational morphology, the aspect of lexical knowledge concerning the structure and formation of complex words. Words such as baker and talking appear to consist of components, traditionally called m..

Modeling Double Dissociation using Widespread, Progressive Damage

Introduction Recent work using connectionist models has demonstrated that double dissociations can arise in non-modular systems. For example, Farah and McClelland (1991) damaged perceptual or functional processing units in a network to produce category specific semantic impairments to biological kinds or artifacts, while Plaut (1995) damaged different banks of connections to produce selective impairments of either abstract or concrete nouns. Both of these models used localized damage to simulate behavioral patterns resulting from focal brain damage. A very different etiology, however, can also produce double dissociations. Gonnerman et al. (in press) reported two Alzheimer's subjects, one with a deficit for natural kinds, the other selectively impaired on artifacts. The present study examines whether a model of a single processing system without separable components can produce double dissociations even when the damage to the system is progressive and widespread, as it is in A