title: Are French dyslexic children sensitive to consonant sonority in segmentation strategies? Preliminary evidence from a letter detection task.
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.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire d'Étude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, EA 3082/Université Lyon 2, Bron, France. norbert.mp@idac.tohoku.ac.jp
authors.forename: Norbert
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Maïonchi-Pino
authors.forename: Bruno
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: de Cara
authors.forename: Jean
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Écalle
authors.forename: Annie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Magnan
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000175:diagnosis*; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D014706:Verbal Learning