QUELQUES OBSERVATIONS SUR LA PSYCHOLOGIE EN ALGERIE: UNE PERSPECTIVE TRANSCULTURELLE

In this article we would like to familiarize our Francophone colleagues with the Algerian sociocultural background as well as with some aspects of psychology in Algeria. This information should facilitate contacts between Francophone and Algerian psychologists in order to contribute to research in the area of cross-cultural psychology. There are three institutes of psychology and educational sciences in Algeria. Most psychologists hold degrees from French universities. Psychologists are not organized into an independent association, but they belong to ‘The Union of Algerian Sociologists and Economists’. Their research projects are concerned with problems specific to Algerian culture as well as with problems in general psychology. We believe that for cross-cultural research, the Algerian culture could provide different factors or greater extremes of factors than those found in the West. Factors related to certain behavior differ in Algeria from those found in the West. One important area of cross-cultural research is the adaptation and validation of tests of personality and intelligence.     

Nature des représentations du langage écrit aux débuts de l'apprentissage de la lecture: un modèle interprétatif

The main objective of this study is to test a knowledge-based simulation model, elaborated in a previous longitudinal research in order to explain reading errors produced by first-grade children. This model relies on two assumptions: (1) in the beginning of the grapho-phonological acquisition, the child tries to extract, from the series of letters which forms a word, graphic patterns corresponding to an oral syllable; (2) these patterns are stored either in an ordered representation or in a non-ordered representation. Permutation errors, often pointed out in this phase of reading acquisition, would then be the mark of a non-ordered representation of the graphic patterns. Two experiments were proposed to new first-grade children, in the middle of the school year. In experiment 1, they had to detect an oral syllable in written pseudo-words in which the first trigram did or did not correspond to the legal order. In experiment 2, they had to read aloud trisyllabic pseudo-words in which the first trigram was presented in four different orders. Reading errors correspond to the predictions our model allows. Moreover, the absence of correlation between the two tasks suggests that the knowledge activated depends on the type of activity.     

Contributions des aspects idiomatiques et morphologiques du langage à la lecture aux CE1 et CM1

Background and objective

To our knowledge, no research has so far associated idiomatic (or figurative) and morphological aspects of language in children reading and in examining the various skills involved. This study aims to: (1) specify, at two levels of reading ability, the implication of these two dimensions of language in decoding-word identification and comprehension and their possible correlation: idiom comprehension and morphemic skills have in common the need to pay attention to the meaning and play with the different levels of language analysis (literal vs figurative and sublexical vs lexical representations); (2) examine individual performance profiles of children with reading difficulties, in the light of these idiomatic and morphological skills.