Letter position processing effect in children aged 7-11 years’ reading of French words aged: Cross-sectional study
Résumé
Letter position processing difficulties have been studied in dyslexic children in transparent languages (Friedmann & Rahamim, 2007), and more recently in more opaque languages such as French (Potier Watkins et al., 2023). The aim of this research was to provide evidence for the existence of a letter position encoding module in typically developing French children, and to study the effect of this module on the reading of migratable words (e.g. /aime/ read /amie/) and migratable pseudowords (e.g. /fulte/ read /flute/) between grades 2 and 6. The scores of 180 children were also measured in standardized tasks. We hypothesize a decrease in Migration Errors (ME) between grades 2 and 6. The gap between ME producing a high-frequency or low-frequency word, with more ME for the high frequency, would increase with expertise. Preliminary analyses support the existence of ME as indicators of difficulties in the functioning of this module. Furthermore, ME differ according to school level, and can be explained by a top-down effect of the lexicon. The results will be discussed within the framework of the computational Spatial Coding Model (Davis, 2010).