Capacité de mémoire de travail et traitement du pronom chez l’enfant

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and reading comprehension in children by testing the processing of pronouns. Two groups of nine- to ten-year-old children classified as high span and low span were administered a pronoun processing task. In this task, the computation of the antecedent referent for pronouns was varied by manipulating the distance between the pronoun and its antecedent and the availability of a gender cue. The results showed that compared to high-span children, low-span children experienced more difficulties in computing a pronoun's referent. High-span children spent longer reading sentences containing anaphoric pronouns when pronouns could not be resolved on the basis of the gender alone, suggesting that the pronouns were resolved as they were read. Low-span children tended to delay resolution until it was required by the task. In the question-answering times, low-span children were more adversely affected by distance than high-span children. Altogether these findings support the view that working memory capacity constrains resolution of anaphoric pronouns in children.     

Le développement de la mémoire de travail : perspectives dans le cadre du modèle de partage temporel des ressources

Working memory has a central role in cognitive development and its capacity is among the best predictors of high-level cognition and school achievement. Within the Time-Based Resource Sharing (TBRS) model, three main factors account for the development of working memory capacity. In this paper, we will review the main empirical evidence sustaining the impact of two of these factors on cognitive development. First, the amount of attention available for cognitive functioning might increase during childhood. Thus, for the same activities, older children would be able to process information faster than younger children. Within working memory span tasks, because the level of activation of memory traces decreases during the processing steps, any reduction of the duration of these steps directly diminishes the time during which the traces decay, and consequently increases the time available for reactivation or refreshing before the next processing step. These two effects jointly induce a stronger activation of the memory traces and a better recall of the to-be-maintained items. Second, because the main hypothesis of the TBRS model is that attention switches to refresh memory traces from processing to maintenance during the processing episodes, the efficiency of the refreshing mechanism should have a direct and strong impact on working memory functioning. An increase in the efficiency of this refreshing during childhood means that older children should take a greater advantage from the short pauses left free between each processing step. The level of activation of the memory traces would be then higher for older than for younger children, resulting in the classically observed increase in span. As a consequence, age-related changes in the efficiency of the refreshing could play a central role in working memory development.     

EMOVAL : évaluation automatique de la valence et de l’activation émotionnelles des textes à l’aide d’une méta-norme de 5656 mots-racines

EMOVAL: automatic evaluation the emotional valence and arousal of texts using a 5656 root-words metanorm. EMOVAL is an emotional valence and arousal analysis model of texts. EMOVAL draws from linguistic tradition the hypothesis that every word has a denotative aspect (“meaning”) and a connotative aspect (“affective halo”). It uses a meta-analysis of seven French norms and one English norm with the objective to characterize the emotional valence of texts, paragraphs, or sentences in a pleasant or unpleasant way. The meta-analysis indicates that the seven French norms data are highly correlated in between (0.82 to 0.99), and highly correlated with the Affectiv Norm for English Words (Bradley et Lang, 1999) (0.81 to 0.97). Arousal values taken from Affective Norm for English Words (ANEW) (Bradley et Lang, 1999) and the Leleu (1987) norm are significately correlated (0.55). The metanorm has 5656 words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) characterized in valence (−1 to +1), and 3265 words characterized in arousal. These items are used by EMOVAL for valence judgments of texts. Two types of texts are proposed: the evaluation of the whole (702) or of extracts (110) of a corpus of sentences judged in a seven-point scale (−3 very unpleasant to +3 very pleasant) (Bestgen et al., 2004), and of 12 texts positively valenced (happiness and good surprise) and negatively valenced (fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and bad surprise). These two types of tests confirm the psychological pertinence of EMOVAL. Limits regarding the arousal dimension are discussed. The metanorm presented in this article can be obtained from the authors.     

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.     

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.     

Développement de la mémoire de travail : relations du centre exécutif avec la boucle phonologique et le calepin visuospatial chez des enfants de CE1 et de CM2

The aim of this study was to examine the development of working memory's components and their relationships. Phonological loop's, visuospatial sketchpad's and central executive's efficiencies were assessed by simple and complex span tasks and executive tasks with verbal and visuospatial material. The analyses were performed on 64 second-grade and 55 fifth-grade children's data. Developmental performances improvement was examined according to tasks and material. Analyses of variance revealed performances improvement according to age and type of material (verbal > non verbal) for the slave system tasks and for a part of central executive's tasks. Correlation analysis and exploratory factorial analysis suggested that slave systems would become progressively more specific and that central executive's efficiency would be dependent on this specialization.     

Les troubles des comportements alimentaires chez des étudiants de première année : une étude prospective multigroupes

There is increasing use of the phrase “campus eating symptoms” to describe regular binge eating (together with frequent exercise, and occasional reliance on vomiting or laxatives), concerns about body image, depressive symptoms, stress, and university adjustment problems among students. Incidence of eating disorders in the early grades of university is increasing, and the period from age 17–19 years (peak of bulimia) which corresponds to the beginning of study at university is critical. Given the stressful environment that is the 1st academic year, it is useful to consider eating disorders risk factors.

Method

Our study is longitudinal. At the beginning, the participants consisted of 1110 freshmen. Data regarding adjustment to university, gender, body image, BMI, transactional variables (perceived stress and coping) and eating disorders (EAT-26) were collected. At T2 (end of academic year), 556 students were recruited to reassess their eating behaviours. The aim of the study was to test gender invariance of a theoretical eating disorders model including all these variables and eating disorders measured a year apart from a mixed population integrating the university for the first times. This model assumes that these variables exert direct effects on eating disorders as measured in time one who in turn will affect the stability of these troubles a year later. Although very little research include boys in the study of eating disorders, the results of our multi-group analysis support the idea of the existence of sex differences in eating disorder predictors: the only common predictor of eating disorders among girls and boys was the use emotion-focused coping. Among boys, the best predictors of eating disorders were problem-focused coping, and seeking social support. Among girls, our results revealed that body mass index, body image, and academic adjustment and stress were the predictors of eating disorders. Finally, we found a temporal stability of eating disorders. This study showed that personal and contextual aspects have a direct impact on students’ eating behaviour. However, among boys, neither body image nor perceived stress affect the eating behaviour but how they cope with stress. The gender gap in the explanation of eating disorders suggest to not exclude the male population in this type of study and to treat the data separately.     

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.     

Expérience de pré-deuil à l’approche du décès de son conjoint : une analyse phénoménologique interprétative

This article aims at scientifically investigating the anticipatory grief/mourning phenomenon, which is referred to the psychic processes before the death of a loved one, using the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). The IPA is grounded on a phenomenological hermeneutic: the indepth study of the meaning-process of a subjective experience by a person. This analysis is applied to the case of a woman caring for her spouse suffering from a cancer, in end-of-life. The findings give an insight of the psychological functioning of a person facing the impending death of a relative, and offer reflection-tools concerning prevention of psychic distress in the bereavement field.     

Le JCR facteur d’impact (IF) et le SCImago Journal Rank Indicator (SJR) des revues françaises : une étude comparative

One of the major functions of academic journals is to contribute to the evaluation of research activities and scientists. Invented more than 50 years ago, the ISI impact factor (IF) became the most important indicator of the quality of journals, in spite of well-known problems and critics such as the over-representation of English-language journals. This is a specific problem for French publishers and scientists; publishing in French is not valorising. Since 2007, the new SCImago Journal Rank Indicator (SJR) offers an alternative to the IF. SJR applies the Google algorithm (PageRank) to the journals of the SCOPUS bibliographic database that indexes more journals than ISI Web of Science. The goal of our study is to compare the two indicators for French academic journals, with three questions: Which is the coverage of French journals by ISI and SCOPUS (title number, scientific disciplines)? Which are the differences of the two indicators IF and SJR for the ranking of French journals? How do they cover the French academic journal publishing market (representativity)? The results of our study of 368 French journals with IF and/or SJR are in favour of the usage of the new indicator, at least as a complement to the IF. (1) Coverage: 166 journals are indexed by ISI (45%), 345 journals are indexed by SCOPUS (94%), 143 journals are indexed by both (39%). 82% of the journals are from STM, 18% are from SS&H. In particular, SCOPUS covers much better the medical and pharmacological sciences. (2) Ranking: The correlation of IF and SJR for the 143 journals with both indicators is high (0.76). The IF better differentiates the journals than the SJR indicator (155 vs. 89 rankings). On the other side, because of the larger source database, more French titles become visible on an international level through SJR than through IF. (3) Representativity: The SJR is more interesting and representative of the French academic journal publishing market than the IF (19% vs. 9%), especially for STM titles (38% vs. 19%), much less for SS&H titles (6% vs. 2%). Nevertheless, ISI (Web of Science) and SCOPUS index journals from only a small part of the French academic publishers (10%–20%). Again, SCOPUS is more representative than the ISI dababase (17% of the publishers vs. 10%). Methodological problems and perspective of a multidimensional evaluation are discussed. Our study compares the ISI impact factor (IF) with the new SJR for 368 French academic journals with IF and/or SJR. The results: The SJR coverage is better than of the IF (94% vs. 45%), especially in medical sciences. The correlation of IF and SJR for journals with both indicators is high (0.76). The IF better differentiates the journals than the SJR indicator (155 vs. 89 rankings). The SJR coverage is more representative of the French academic journal publishing market than ISI/IF (19% vs. 9%), especially for STM titles (38% vs. 19%), less for SS&H titles (6% vs. 2%).