Développement de la connaissance des lettres capitales. Étude transversale chez les enfants français de trois à six ans

The present study examined the knowledge of uppercase letters in 160 children aged from three to six. Three tasks were administrated: letter saying, letter naming, letter recognition. Children's responses were analyzed according to several variables: school level, gender, task, letter type, letter frequency, etc. Letter knowledge improved from three to six years, but with huge differences among children, namely the superiority of girls over boys. Letter by letter analyses showed that scores were highly consistent between tasks and school levels. They also revealed that letter knowledge was affected by letter type, letter frequency, alphabetic rank and the presence of letters in the child's first name. The findings are discussed for their contribution to the understanding of letter learning.     

Habiletés phonologiques chez des enfants dysphasiques de GS et CP : étude comparative avec des enfants au développement langagier normal

The aim of this study was to investigate the deficit in phonological skills of pre-reader and beginning reader children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). We compared their performances in different metaphonological tasks (a common unit detection task (syllable vs phoneme) and a phoneme deletion task) with those of children with Normal Language Development (NLD) of the same school level. Phoneme detection task is very difficult for all children in kindergarten. The performances of SLI children are poorer than those of NLD children for syllables and phonemes in first grade. The forced choice phoneme deletion tasks point out a specific difficulty for children with SLI to focus on the phonological properties of words when their attention must shift from content to form.     

Connaissance du nom et du son des lettres, habiletés métaphonémiques et capacités de décodage en grande section de maternelle

This study examined the specific implication of letter-name knowledge in reading acquisition on 5-year-old kindergarten children. Several studies underlined the importance of both phonological and orthographic skills (letters and grapho-phonological associations’ knowledge developed during reading acquisition). So, we focused on the link between those different early abilities and on their links with reading acquisition during school year. Thus, at the beginning and at the end of the year, we proposed to 40 children metaphonemic tasks (phoneme identification in initial and final position in the words), letter-sound and letter-name knowledge tasks (naming and identification) and a pseudo-words decoding task. In addition, to access letter-name knowledge, two types of measurements were proposed: an accuracy measure and a speed one. Mean number of correct responses and reaction times were collected by children and analysed too. Results show that letter-name knowledge could play a part in metaphonemic abilities development and in letter-sound associations’ discovery and acquisition, at the beginning of the year. Thanks to those skills improvement, letter-name knowledge could have an indirect impact on later children's decoding skills. Furthermore, the direct link, already observed at the beginning of the year, between letter-name knowledge and decoding skills still exists in April. At last, analyses on letter-name knowledge access time show that the more children name an important number of letters, the more they do it quickly. These results could mean that a certain level of letter-name knowledge have to be reach before children could use this knowledge automatically. All together, results confirm the importance of good letter-name knowledge in the first stages of reading acquisition. We also suggest taking into account some clues of letter-name knowledge's automatic use to better understand reading acquisition processes.     

Influence de la composition de la fratrie sur les pratiques éducatives parentales déclarées et sur la représentation de l'éducation chez les préadolescents

The aim of our study is to analyze the influence of the make up of the siblings on the parents' educational practices and also on the meaning of education to preadolescents. The results gathered from a sample of 88 preadolescents and their mothers show a difference of parental educational practices according to the make up of the siblings (relaxation of the practices with the youngest). The study of the meaning of education to preadolescents shows that only children are the most in accordance with their mothers. Children from large families imagine a future education further from mothers' educational practices.     

Représentations de la société et pratiques éducatives en contexte de disparité culturelle : les choix de scolarisation de l'enfant chez des parents sénégalais

The purpose of this study, including the socio-cultural context of Senegal, is to show how society and social change's representations affect the choice to attend school or not. Representations of the society and of the social change have been apprehended during half directive talks, accomplished with twenty subjects (parents of Senegalese children) and put in evidence by statistical analyses, both lexical and morphosyntactical. It emerges from the results that important changes concerning representations of the society and of the social change - especially according to school attendance's modes - can be observed. Parent's positions on the social change - sometimes ambivalents - underline incoherence of link between society and social change's representations and school attendance's methods in a cross-cultural context.     

L'intervention des explications causales internes en termes d'effort dans les stratégies d'autoprésentation et le jugement social : perspectives sociocognitives

This article pursues two aims. The first one is to propose an extension of the theory of the social norm of internality by studying the value of various types of internal and external causal explanations of reinforcements. A first study shows that students (n = 155) choose more effort-based explanations to explain spontaneously a success or a failure to an exam. A second study, realized with students placed in judge's position (n = 80), reveals that effort-based explanations are more appreciated than others explanations, regardless of the event desirability. The second aim of this article is to show that attributional approach and the theory of the social norm of internality are based on different definitions of social judgment and concern different psychological phenomena. A third study realized with students (n = 63) placed in judge's position shows that the effect of the type of explanations for explaining a success or a failure varies according to the nature of the judgment (approval/punishment, probability of success, competence and motivation).     

Implication des fonctions exécutives dans le décodage en lecture : étude comparative entre normolecteurs et faibles lecteurs de CE2

The implication of executive functions in reading was studied. Normo and poor third grade readers were compared in an illusory conjunction task using the selection of a letter features embedded in a grapheme or risen to the syllable boundary. Executive task of updating or shifting were then added to this task. According to decoding progress from graphemes to syllables we suppose that the cost of executive processing will be more important for poor readers. Results showed that addition of an executive control task to a selection task, led to an increase in response times for poor readers whatever the presentation (grapheme, syllable).     

Émergence des habiletés phonologiques chez le jeune enfant : analyse des interventions des assistantes maternelles en situations d'interaction avec des enfants de deux à trois ans

Few studies are concerned with the emergence of young children phonological abilities. After mentioning the two main hypothesis regarding the emergence of phonological abilities, we consider a socio-constructivist hypothesis that adults may focus child attention on various word units. Nine caregiver-child (about 2;3 years of age) dyads were filmed in order to extract the caregiver's speech acts related to word-structure in several reading contexts (books and picture card set). The corpus analysis showed that the frequency and the nature of speech acts differed both according to the concerned caregiver and context. In addition, caregivers' speech acts were mainly focused on syllables.     

La mise en place des représentations d'attachement au sein du couple : parts relatives à l'enfance et au conjoint

The aim of the present study is to compare childhood attachment representations with representations relative to present love relationships, and examine the possible role of the partner's representations when differences are found between the two types of representations. Twenty-two couples passed the Adult Attachment Interview (George et al., 1985), as well as an attachment interview on their present love relationship. Statistical analyses revealed a stronger concordance between childhood and adult representations among insecure people, compared with secure participants. Also, men seemed more inclined to maintain the same type of attachment representations regarding their love relationship as those developed with respect to parents. These findings suggest that defensive exclusion prevents the formation of new attachment representations and the updating of internal working models. The role played by gender remains unclear and warrants further research.