Vision parafovéale et extraction précoce de la structure des phrases durant la lecture

According to the structural approach to reading (Psychon Bull Rev 1 (1994) 345-356), the extraction of structure precedes the analysis of meaning and is partially influenced by parafoveal information. We propose a new experimental design to examine, on the one hand, the implication of parafoveal information in the establishment of structural frames and, on the other hand, the size of these structural frames - from nine to 27 signs. We show that readers can be sensitive to the syntactic skeleton of the sentence until a distance of 27 signs from the fixation point. We discuss the results in the perspective of the structural model of reading and of the unconscious utilization of information (Cognition 80 (2000) 215-229).     

Maîtrise de l’oral et de l’écrit en français et en tahitien : une étude longitudinale du CP au CM2 en Polynésie française

Many international scientific studies underline the advantage of bilingual children in oral language. This is especially evident in their meta-linguistic skills, as well as their writing, reading and written expression. Bilingualism could facilitate meta-linguistic development by allowing the child to differentiate early formal and semantic aspects of the code, perceive the arbitrary relationship between “ signified ” and “ significant ” and develop greater cognitive flexibility. This study, conducted in French Polynesia, had examined the specific effect of bilingual program on the morphological awareness and the cross-lingual effects of Tahitian-French transfers via the written word. A group of 128 Polynesian students were followed longitudinally from the end of First Grade to the end of Fifth Grade. Of these 128 students, 59 were part of an experimental group involved beginning in the First Grade, in two successive educational programs with five hours per week of Polynesian language and culture, which included systematic learning of reading and writing in Tahitian. A selection of 69 other students, who had never participated in these programs, constituted the control group. All students were tested each year on their oral language skills in French and Tahitian. At the end of Third Grade, a morphological awareness assessment in French was introduced (Reder et al., 2013), as well as a task of word recognition (TIME3 of Ecalle, 2006), a reading-comprehension (Lobrot, 1980) and spelling tasks (ECS3, Khomsi, 1998). These standardized assessments have been adapted in Tahitian. The first results acknowledged a positive effect of the bilingual education curriculum on Tahitian oral skills and on cross-lingual links between written skills and morphological awareness. In addition, the Tahitian word recognition greatly helped to explain the French written skills, after controlling the level of French morphological awareness.     

De l’impossibilité d’un traitement syntaxique parafovéal à longue portée : une réplique à Foucambert (2008)

Based on results with a new method, Foucambert (2008) argued that syntactic processing can occur as far as 27 characters to the right of the fixation point. In this reply, we demonstrate that the method used by Foucambert was not appropriate. In addition, Foucambert's results did not support his conclusion. We replicate Foucambert's study while monitoring eye movements. Results revealed that subjects’ eye movements were biased to the right of the fixation point. In addition, subjects were unable to engage in syntactic processing of words far in periphery. Taken together, results fit well with current models of eye movements and of the missing-letter effect.