Evidence for a preserved sensitivity to orthographic redundancy and an impaired access to phonological syllables in French developmental dyslexics

Evidence for a preserved sensitivity to orthographicredundancy and an impaired access to phonologicalsyllables in French developmental dyslexics

Nadège Doignon-Camus & Alix Seigneuric &

Emeline Perrier & Aurélie Sisti & Daniel Zagar

Received: 20 December 2011 /Accepted: 28 June 2012 /Published online: 20 July 2012# The International Dyslexia Association 2012

Abstract To evaluate the orthographic and phonological processing skills of developmentaldyslexics, we (a) examined their abilities to exploit properties of orthographic redundancyand (b) tested whether their phonological deficit extends to spelling-to-sound connectionsfor large-grain size units such as syllables. To assess the processing skills in dyslexics, weutilized the illusory conjunction paradigm to investigate the nature of reading units in Frenchdyslexic and control children matched in reading age. In control children, reading units weredefined by both orthographic redundancy and phonological syllable information. In dys-lexics, however, reading units were defined only by orthographic redundancy. Therefore,despite their impairment in reading acquisition, developmental dyslexics have the ability toencode and exploit letter frequency co-occurrences. In contrast, their access to phonologicalsyllables from letters was impaired, suggesting that their phonological deficit extends tolarge grain-size phonological units.

Keywords Developmental dyslexia . Orthographic redundancy . Reading units . Syllable

The present study aimed to investigate orthographic and phonological processing skills inFrench children with dyslexia compared with reading-level-matched controls.Developmental dyslexia is defined as impaired acquisition of reading despite normalintelligence and conventional instruction and in the absence of any sensory deficit

Ann. of Dyslexia (2013) 63:117–132DOI 10.1007/s11881-012-0075-3

N. Doignon-Camus (*)LINC, UMR 7237, CNRS, Université de Strasbourg, 21 rue Becquerel, 67087 Strasbourg, Francee-mail: [email protected]

A. SeigneuricUTRPP-EA 4403, Université Paris XIII, Paris, France

E. Perrier :A. SistiISTR, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, Lyon, France

D. ZagarUniversité de Bourgogne, Dijon, France

(Snowling, 2000). Dyslexic children are widely characterized by a phonological core deficit(Ramus & Szenkovits, 2008; Snowling, 2001; Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling, & Scanlon,2004; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Behavioral studies have focused on several aspects ofphonological skills such as phonological awareness (Boada & Pennington, 2006; Wagner &Torgesen, 1987), word and picture naming (Swan & Goswami, 1997), short-term memoryusing word and non-word repetition tasks (Szenkovits & Ramus, 2005), and non-wordreading (Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992; Sprenger-Charolles, Colé, Lacert, & Serniclaes,2000). Moreover, electrophysiology and brain imaging have provided evidence that indi-viduals with developmental dyslexia have deficits in integration of letters and speech sounds(Blau et al., 2010; Blomert, 2010; Froyen, Willems, & Blomert, 2010).

Different explanations of this phonological deficit have been provided. Two of them havebeen widely discussed: either phonological representations are supposed to be degraded(Harm & Seidenberg, 1999), or phonological representations are supposed to be intact whiletheir access is impaired (Szenkovits & Ramus, 2005). Studies investigating access tophonological representations from print in individuals with developmental dyslexia havefocused mainly on letter-phoneme units. However, larger grain-size units are involved inreading acquisition (Bryant & Goswami 1987; Doignon-Camus & Zagar, 2009; Goswami,1993; Treiman, 1992; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) and visual word recognition by expertreaders (Rey, Ziegler, & Jacobs, 2000; Taft & Forster, 1975, 1976; Taft, 1979; Treiman &Chafetz, 1987). In orthographies in which letter–sound relationships are relatively consis-tent, such as Spanish and French, syllable units are thought to play roles in word parsing inbeginning (Doignon & Zagar, 2006) and expert (Doignon & Zagar, 2005) readers, as well inword processing in beginning (Chetail & Mathey, 2009a; Colé, Magnan, & Grainger, 1999;Colé & Sprenger-Charolles, 1999; Jiménez, García, O’Shanahan, & Rojas 2010; Maïonchi-Pino, Magnan, & Ecalle, 2010a) and expert (Carreiras, Alvarez, & de Vega, 1993; Chetail &Mathey, 2009a; Conrad, Grainger, & Jacobs, 2007; Mathey & Zagar, 2002) readers. To date,few studies have explored the efficiency of letter-to-syllable connections in individuals withdevelopmental dyslexia and reported inconsistent results. The role of syllable units in wordprocessing in dyslexic children has been examined using a visual target detection task (Colé& Sprenger-Charolles, 1999; Maïonchi-Pino, Magnan, & Ecalle, 2010b) in which partic-ipants had to decide whether a printed CVor CVC target appeared or not at the beginning ofa printed word whose first syllable was either CVor CVC. According to the authors, this taskreflects the phonological grapho-syllabic processing. Maïonchi-Pino et al. (2010b) found asyllable compatibility effect for high-frequency words in dyslexic children: they morequickly detected a target in a written word when the target matched the initial syllable thanwhen the target did not match the initial syllable. By contrast, Colé and Sprenger-Charolles(1999) found no syllable compatibility effects for both low- and high-frequency words indyslexic children. Thus, it remains unclear whether dyslexia-related impairments affectspelling-to-sound connections for large-grain size units such as syllables.

The phonological deficit in dyslexic children may result from a disorder of visual letter-string coding (Vidyasagar and Pammer, 2010). Dyslexics may exhibit a deficit in the dorsalstream, which acts to control an attentional spotlight scanning letter strings, leading to poororthographic coding (Pammer & Vidyasagar, 2005; Vidyasagar, 2004). This proposal isbased on empirical results showing a deficit of attentional mechanisms in dyslexics (Bosse,Tainturier, & Valdois, 2007; Facoetti, Paganoni, Turatto, Marzola, & Mascetti 2000). Severalstudies have focused specifically on orthographic processing in developmental dyslexia,with evidence for early orthographic deficits observed during the time course of wordprocessing, as shown electrophysiologically (Savill & Thierry, 2011). Whereas childrenwho learn to read without impairment develop a coarse form of visual tuning for print

118 N. Doignon-Camus et al.

(Maurer et al., 2006), reflected as an increased amplitude of early components (i.e., P1 andmainly N1) for words compared with symbol strings, dyslexic children clearly showed areduced visual tuning for print (Maurer et al., 2007). Moreover, in contrast to normal readers,dyslexic children show no processing difference between words and pseudowords duringearly time-windows (Taroyan & Nicolson, 2009).

A second set of results, primarily from behavioral studies, suggests that dyslexic childrendo not exhibit impaired orthographic processing, suggesting that dyslexics are able tocompensate for reading difficulties by increased use of a visual/orthographic code (Rack,1985; Siegel, Share, & Geva, 1995). Evidence for preserved orthographic processing comesfrom investigations on orthographic awareness, as measured by the ability to choose a“wordlike” letter string from two alternatives that varied as a function of orthographiclegality (Siegel, Share, & Geva, 1995); on cued recall efficiency, in which cues could beorthographically similar to targets (Rack, 1985); or on pseudoword superiority effects in theReicher–Wheeler task (Grainger, Bouttevin, Truc, Bastien, & Ziegler, 2003). This latterstudy found that both dyslexic and control children more accurately detected letters inpseudowords than in nonwords (i.e., illegal letter strings), suggesting that dyslexics hadthe ability to exploit orthographic regularities of letter strings. Taken together, these studieson orthographic processing efficiency in individuals with developmental dyslexia haveyielded inconsistent results, suggesting that more data are needed.

We therefore explored the orthographic and phonological processing skills of dyslexicchildren. One straightforward method that can be used to examine the ability to buildspelling-to-sound connections on large-grain size and to exploit orthographic regularitiesis to focus on the nature of reading units in French. Reading units are multi-letter units thatare automatically perceived in written words during the first steps of processing (Prinzmetal,Hoffman, & Vest, 1991). These units of visual parsing are reflected by feature integrationerrors (Treisman & Schmidt, 1982) in the illusory conjunction paradigm (Prinzmetal,Treiman, & Rho, 1986), in which participants have to detect a target letter in a string ofcolored letters and to report its color (e.g., report the colors of V in ANvil or ANVil, in whichthe upper and lower cases represent two different colors). In some trials, participantsperceive an incorrect combination of color and letter and report an incorrect color; theseperceptive errors are called illusory conjunctions and reflect perceptual groupings of letters(Fig. 1). Two types of illusory conjunctions are possible as a function of the stimulus display.The first is an illusory conjunction which preserves the syllable boundary. If the stimulusANVIL is displayed ANVil, participants may report that V is the color of IL. This error hasbeen termed a preservation error, because VIL forms a syllable (Seidenberg, 1987). Thesecond is an illusory conjunction which violates the syllable boundary. If the stimulusANVIL is displayed ANvil, participants may report that V is the color of AN. This errorhas been termed a violation error, because ANV does not form a syllable (Seidenberg, 1987).Results have shown that participants made more illusory conjunctions that preserved thesyllable boundary (e.g., for ANVil, reporting V as the color of IL) than those that broke thesyllable boundary (e.g., for ANvil, reporting V as the color of AN) (Prinzmetal, Treiman, &Rho, 1986; Prinzmetal, Hoffman, & Vest, 1991; Rapp, 1992 in English; Doignon & Zagar,2005 in French). Such a result means that participants perceived syllables as reading units.Consequently, the question arises as to how readers can perceive reading units. In English,reading units are characterized primarily by orthographic information, with written wordsparsed into reading units when the syllable boundary corresponds to a letter cluster thatnever occurs at either the initial or final position of a syllable (e.g., NV in ANVIL)(Prinzmetal et al., 1986, 1991; Rapp, 1992). Since bigrams that straddle syllable boundaryare less frequent than bigrams that constitute syllable units (i.e., the pattern of the bigram

Orthographic and phonological skills of dyslexics 119

trough), reading units may be due to orthographic redundancy (Seidenberg, 1987). In French,reading units are characterized by both phonological and orthographic information (Doignonand Zagar, 2005). For example, participants made more illusory conjunctions that preservedthan that broke syllable boundaries, even when these syllable boundaries were not marked bybigram troughs, primarily for words with a first CV syllable. This finding suggested thatphonological syllable information underlies syllable parsing. Attempts to disentangle the effectsof orthographic redundancy and phonological syllable units on syllable parsing consisted of theorthogonal manipulation of sources of both orthographic and phonological information, withphonological information manipulated by the position of the syllable boundary and orthograph-ic information by the position of an orthographic boundary determined by the second bigramfrequency (Doignon and Zagar, 2005; experiments 2 and 3). The factorial design consisted oftwo conditions: a congruent condition, in which both the phonological and orthographicboundaries coincided and produced the same pattern of illusory conjunctions (e.g., words suchas MULET, for which the bigram UL straddling the syllable boundary was of low frequency);and a conflicting condition, in which the orthographic and phonological boundaries did notcoincide and produced two different patterns of illusory conjunctions (e.g., words such asCARAT, for which the bigram straddling the syllable boundary AR was of high frequency). Asyllable effect (i.e., more preservation than violation errors) was observed in the congruentcondition, but was dramatically attenuated in the conflicting condition. These results providedevidence that both letter-to-syllable activation and orthographic redundancy are used to per-ceive reading units in French, for both expert (Doignon & Zagar, 2005) and beginning readers(Doignon & Zagar, 2006) in grades 1 to 5.

Inasmuch as reading units in French are defined by two sources of phonological andorthographic information, investigations of these reading units in dyslexic children cansimultaneously explore the efficiency of both orthographic and phonological processing.Although the illusory conjunction paradigm has been used in dyslexic French children(Fabre & Bedoin, 2003), the results of syllable parsing were inconsistent. That study,however, was not designed to investigate syllable segmentation per se but to test the

Fig. 1 Examples of illusory con-junction errors as a function ofstimulus display


sensitivity of these children to phonetic characteristics of printed stimuli. The present studyof the illusory conjunction paradigm utilized the same experimental design as Doignon andZagar (2005, 2006). Depending on the extent of the phonological deficit on large grain-sizeunits, and the ability of dyslexic children to exploit orthographic regularities of letter strings,there were three possible outcomes. First, if the phonological deficit in developmentaldyslexia extends to letter-to-syllable connections, the access to phonological syllable unitsshould be impaired. Reading units in letter strings would thus be perceived only according toorthographic redundancy, irrespective of the position of the syllable boundary. In thecongruent condition, in which statistical orthographic properties outline syllable units, moreillusory conjunctions that preserve than violate the syllable boundary would be expected. Incontrast, the opposite effect would be expected in the conflicting condition, in whichstatistical orthographic properties do not outline syllable units. Indeed, in the conflictingcondition, syllable and orthographic information are antagonists, creating two differentpotential reading units. If participants produce more violation than preservation errors inthe conflicting condition, it means that reading units do not correspond to syllable units. Inthis case, reading units are perceived as a function of orthographic redundancy. Second,dyslexia in children may be characterized by an efficient phonological processing of largegrain size units but an impaired sensitivity to statistical orthographic properties. If so,reading units would be perceived according to phonological syllable units, regardless ofthe orthographic redundancy properties of letter strings. Thus, for both congruent andconflicting conditions, we would expect more illusory conjunctions that preserve thanviolate syllable segmentation. Indeed, if participants produce more preservation than viola-tion errors in the conflicting condition, it means that reading units correspond to syllableunits. In this case, reading units are perceived as a function of phonological information.Finally, if developmental dyslexia consists of impairments of both phonological syllableactivation and orthographic redundancy encoding, no reading units would be perceived,resulting in as many illusory conjunctions that preserve as violate syllable segmentation.

To examine the orthographic and phonological processing skills of French dyslexicchildren, we compared the patterns of illusory conjunctions in the congruent and conflictingconditions in dyslexic children and control children matched in reading age.

Methods

Participants We assessed 55 children, all of whom were native French speakers. Thedyslexic group consisted of 27 children (mean age, 10.9 years; range, 9.3 to 12.4 years;and SD, 10 months), recruited through speech therapists who had diagnosed phonologicaldyslexia. All of these children had a documented history of reading difficulties and hadreceived some degree of remedial instruction in reading, spelling, or oral language. All wereof reading age at least 18 months below the age norm on a standardized reading test(Alouette, Lefavrais, 1967), with a mean reading age of 7.6 years (range, 6.8 to 8.6 yearsand SD, 6 months), corresponding to a mean reading delay of 39 months (range, 22–63 months and SD, 12 months). Children were excluded if they had neurological or sensorydeficit or if their score on the Conner’s abbreviated parent–teacher rating scale (Conners,1990) was outside of the pathological range (>15).

The control group consisted of 28 normally developing control children, matched on readinglevel, with a mean reading age of 7.6 years (range, 6.8 to 8.6 years and SD, 6 months), identicalto the dyslexic group (F<1). However, their chronological age (mean, 7.5 years; range, 6.6 to8.9 years; and SD, 7 months) was significantly lower (F(1, 53)0279.02, p<0.001).


Procedure Participants performed an illusory conjunction task (Fig. 1). We utilized themethodology described by Prinzmetal et al. (1986, experiments 3–5). Each trial began withthe presentation of a white letter at the center of the screen, replaced 1,500 ms later by a grayrectangle for 214 ms. The stimulus pseudoword was briefly presented in upper case in one ofthe four corners and then replaced by the rectangle. Each pseudoword appeared in two colorsrandomly chosen among blue, yellow, and red. Each pseudoword was presented twice.Either the first two letters were one color and the last three letters another color, or the firstthree letters were one color and the last two letters another color. Participants were instructedto report the color of the target letter by pressing one of the three keys marked blue, yellow,and red. Control children, who were younger than the dyslexic children, verbally reportedthe color of the target letter and the experimenter pressed the corresponding key. The targetletter was always the middle letter of each five-letter pseudoword. Visual feedback wasprovided for incorrect responses.

Each session began with a practice block of 29 trials followed by 2 blocks of 40experimental trials each. The duration of exposure was adjusted for each participant tomaintain an error rate of approximately 20 % throughout the experiment. The initial durationof exposure was fixed at 23 refresh cycles (328 ms), with duration adjusted every three trialsin the practice phase and every ten trials in the experimental phase, in decrements andincrements of one refresh cycle (14.28 ms). The mean exposure duration for dyslexicparticipants was 17.89 refresh cycles (256 ms) and ranged from 14.62 to 27.14 cycles,whereas the mean exposure duration for control children was 21.19 refresh cycles (303 ms)and ranged from 16.04 to 28.99 cycles. The difference of mean exposure duration betweenthe two groups was significant (t(53)0−3.44, p<0.01). Figure 2 presents the time course ofexposure duration of the 109 stimuli throughout the experiment for the two groups. Thedifference between the two groups clearly appears in the practice phase (i.e., the first 29items), in which the decrease of exposure duration is more marked for dyslexics than forcontrol children. In contrast in the experimental phase, the decrease of exposure duration isvery similar for the two groups. As noted above, the exposure duration of stimuli depends onthe proportion of correct responses. The time course of stimulus exposure duration in the

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practice phase shows that dyslexics performed better the target detection task than controlchildren. This result may probably be due to the fact that dyslexics are older than controls.

Stimuli The stimuli were the same as in the illusory conjunction experiment with beginningreaders (Doignon and Zagar, 2006). Forty five-letter bisyllabic pseudowords were created.To avoid biased responses, the illusory conjunction paradigm required that the target letter(i.e., the central letter) be part of either the first or second syllable. Therefore, half of thepseudowords had a syllable boundary (marked by a slash) between the second and thirdletters (e.g., RO/NER, referred to as CV items) and the other half had a syllable boundarybetween the third and fourth letters (e.g., RON/TA, referred to as CVC items). Pseudowordswere matched across both conditions for the first three letters. Half of the items had a secondbigram of lower frequency (mean, 1,872) than the third bigram (mean, 4,176), creating anorthographic boundary (marked by an asterisk) between the second and third letters (e.g.,BI*MIR and BI*MBU). The other half had a second bigram of higher frequency (mean,23,001) than the third bigram (mean, 5,604), creating an orthographic boundary between thethird and fourth letters (e.g., RON*ER and RON*TA). Positional bigram frequencies werecomputed from Brulex (Content, Mousty, & Radeau, 1990). Factorial manipulation of thepositions of the syllable and orthographic boundaries led to two conditions. In the congruentcondition, the orthographic boundary coincided with the syllable boundary (e.g., BI/*MIR,RON/*TA); whereas, in the conflicting condition, the boundaries did not coincide (e.g., RO/N*ER, BI*M/BU). Examples of each condition are presented in Table 1.

Results

Two types of errors were possible: (a) false alarms, when participants reported a color that wasnot present in the word; and (b) illusory conjunctions, when participants incorrectly reported acolor that was present in the word. Two types of illusory conjunctions were possible: preser-vation errors, when participants incorrectly reported the target letter as being the same color asthe rest of the syllable (e.g., reporting that M was the same color as IR in the stimulus BIMir),and violation errors, when participants incorrectly reported the target letter as being of samecolor as letters that did not form a syllable with the target letter (e.g., reporting that M was the

Table 1 Pseudoword materials

Condition Position of syllable andorthographic boundaries

Display for preservationerrors

Display for violationerrors

Congruent

CV items BI/*MIR BIMir BImir

CVC items RON/*TA ROnta RONta

Conflicting

CV items RO/N*ER RONer ROner

CVC items BI*M/BU BImbu BIMbu

Upper and lower case letters indicate different colors. During the experiment, pseudowords were presented inupper-case letters in two colors

*Syllable boundaries and orthographic boundaries


same color as BI in the stimulus BImir). If phonological syllables influenced the pattern ofillusory conjunction errors, there should be more preservation than violation errors.

The overall error rate on experimental trials was 14.99 % for the dyslexic group (0.99 %false alarms and 14 % illusory conjunctions) and 16.02 % for the normal group (1.87 % falsealarms and 14.15 % illusory conjunctions). Analyses of variance by groups (normal readersvs. dyslexics), syllable boundaries (CV vs. CVC items), conditions (congruent vs.conflicting) and error type (preservations vs. violations) were performed on the proportionof preservation and violation errors relative to the number of total errors (i.e., illusoryconjunctions and false alarms). These ANOVAs were performed for participants (F1) anditems (F2). The mean percentages of illusory conjunction errors are presented in Fig. 3.

On average, control children made more preservation than violation errors (13.74 vs.8.52 %), suggesting a robust effect of phonological syllable units, whereas dyslexics madeslightly more violation than preservation errors (12.24 vs. 11.12 %). The interaction betweenerror type and group was significant in the analysis by participants (F(1, 53)09.82, p<0.01)and only approached significance in the analysis by items (F2(1, 36)02.66, p00.11). Moreinterestingly, the four-way interaction of group, condition, syllable boundary, and error typewas significant in participant analysis (F1(1, 53)04.51, p<0.05) but not in item analysis (F2(1, 36)01.153, p>0.10). Thus, the pattern of illusory conjunctions differed for dyslexic andcontrol children matched in reading age.

The main result in dyslexics was the reliable interaction between condition and error type,F1(1, 53)025.56, p<0.0001 and F2(1, 36)010.96, p<0.01. Dyslexic children made morepreservation than violation errors in the congruent condition (14.33 vs. 8.1 %; F1(1, 53)08.21, p<0.01 and F2(1, 36)08.48, p<0.01) but more violation than preservation errors in theconflicting condition (16.38 vs. 7.9 %; F1(1, 53)019.58, p<0.0001 and F2(1, 36)03.13, p00.08). No significant interaction was observed with the position of the syllable boundary (F<1).

In control children, the pattern of illusory conjunctions clearly differed according to thesyllable boundary of stimuli (i.e., for CVand CVC pseudowords), as shown by the interactionof syllable boundary, condition, and error type in participant analysis (F1(1, 53)05.82, p<0.05but F2(1, 36)01.57, p>0.10). Firstly for CVC stimuli, we observed that the pattern of illusoryconjunctions differed for the congruent and conflicting conditions. In the congruent condition,control children made more preservation than violation errors (17.87 vs. 6.39 %; F1(1, 53)015.23, p<0.001 and F2(1, 36)010.35, p<0.01). In contrast in the conflicting condition, theymade more violation than preservation errors (11.85 vs. 6.36 %; F1(1, 53)04.89, p<0.05 butF2<1). The overall pattern of data for CVC stimuli is confirmed by the significant interactionbetween condition and error type, F1(1, 53)018.45, p<0.0001, F2(1, 36)07.42, p<0.01.Secondly for CV items, we found a consistent pattern of illusory conjunctions for the congruentand the conflicting condition. Indeed, control children made more preservation than violationerrors for both congruent and conflicting conditions (15.37 vs. 7.96%;F1(1, 53)08.39, p<0.01and F2(1,36)04.22, p<0.05). The interaction between condition and error type was notsignificant for these CV pseudowords (F<1).

Discussion

We have compared the orthographic and phonological processing abilities of French chil-dren with developmental dyslexia and control children matched in reading level. We focusedon parsing units of letter strings that are the reading units revealed by the illusory conjunc-tion pattern. In normal readers, the superiority of preservation to violation errors in thecongruent condition is attenuated or even cancelled in the conflicting condition, suggesting


that reading units are defined by both orthographic redundancy and phonological syllables(Doignon & Zagar, 2005, 2006). We observed an identical global pattern in control children.Moreover, exactly as in Doignon & Zagar (2006), beginning readers in grade 1, with a meanage of 7 years, showed a marked difference between CVand CVC stimuli. For pseudowords

CV items

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Fig. 3 Mean percent illusory conjunctions for control and dyslexic children


with a first CV syllable, the reading units were clearly defined by the position of thephonological syllabic boundary, with the statistical properties of orthographic redundancynot affecting the pattern of illusory conjunctions. For pseudowords with a first CVC syllable,however, the reading units were defined by both phonological syllabic and orthographicsources of information, as the proportion of preservation and violation errors varied as afunction of the congruence between phonological and orthographic boundaries. Divergencebetween syllable structures, mainly between CV and CVC syllables, has been documented,with robust and stable effects of syllable perception with CV syllables (Doignon & Zagar,2005) and syllable processing with CV syllables (Álvarez, Carreiras, & Perea, 2004; Chetail& Mathey, 2009b; Colé et al., 1999). CV syllables are the most frequent syllabic structuresin the French language (Wioland, 1985), which may account for the strength of the syllableperception in the conflicting condition and the resistance to orthographic statisticalproperties.

A striking result was the pattern of illusory conjunctions in dyslexic children. In congru-ent conditions, in which syllable and orthographic boundaries coincided, dyslexics were ableto parse pseudowords into syllable units. In contrast to control children at the same readinglevel, dyslexics produced significantly more violation than preservation errors in theconflicting condition, in which syllable and orthographic boundaries did not coincide.This result clearly showed a pure orthographic effect on letter string parsing, in that dyslexicchildren only used statistical properties of orthographic redundancy to mark visual readingunits. As suggested (Adams, 1979), letters that repeatedly occurred at the same time wouldbecome associated, such that the activation of one would facilitate the activation of the other.The syllabic units of a word can thus be outlined by the relative strength of the associationsbetween adjacent letter units (Seidenberg, 1987). These findings suggest that, despite theirimpairments in reading acquisition, developmental dyslexics have the ability to encode andexploit the frequency of letter co-occurrences (Grainger et al., 2003). The question arising ishow dyslexics develop sensitivity to orthographic redundancy and acquire orthographicknowledge. Orthographic knowledge refers to the knowledge of spelling of written wordsand to the recognition of sequences and typical positions of letters within words (for a recentreview, Apel, 2011; Siegel et al., 1995). A widespread hypothesis is that phonological skillsare of major importance for the acquisition of orthographic knowledge (Share, 1995, 2004;Ehri, 1992). Here, we show that children can acquire knowledge about orthographicstatistical regularities while their spelling-to-sound correspondences are impaired.Phonological decoding skills appear therefore not absolutely necessary to attune the atten-tion to the children to orthographic information of letter strings. Our finding is consistentwith those reporting that preschool and kindergarten-age children are able to implicitlyacquire orthographic knowledge (Apel, 2010; Wolter & Apel, 2010). Moreover, someprevious studies have showed that phonological ability is not the sole contributor to thedevelopment of orthographic knowledge (Cunningham, Perry, Stanovich, & Share, 2002). Astraightforward hypothesis to account for the sensitivity to orthographic redundancy indyslexic children is to assume the efficiency of a statistical learning mechanism (Kirkham,Slemmer, & Johnson, 2002; Perruchet & Pacton, 2006).

As revealed by the conflicting condition where dyslexics produced more violation thanpreservation errors, our findings also indicate that phonological syllable boundaries did notproduce a bias in illusory conjunctions. Moreover, contrary to control children matched inreading level, dyslexics produced similar patterns of illusory conjunctions for pseudowordswith a CVor CVC first syllable. As noted above, divergence between CVand CVC syllableprocessing has been reported in normal readers (Álvarez et al., 2004; Chetail & Mathey,2009b; Colé et al., 1999). Based on the frequency of syllable structures in French and


Spanish languages, CV syllables have been considered as canonical syllables. The presentdata suggest that developmental dyslexics are not sensitive to phonological structures ofwritten syllable units. These findings extend previous results, by showing that the phono-logical deficit in developmental dyslexia not only affects letter-to-grapheme connections butthe correspondences between letter clusters and phonological large-grain size units such assyllables. The letter-to-syllable connections revealed by the illusory conjunction pattern havea prelexical locus. The task of the illusory conjunction paradigm does not require lexicalaccess, and the use of pseudowords restricts top-down lexical processes. In beginningreaders, the prelexical connection between letters and phonological syllables is rapidly builtand already efficient by Grade 1 (Doignon & Zagar, 2006). Since we observed differentpatterns in control and dyslexic children matched in reading level, we could exclude thehypothesis that dyslexia is due to a developmental delay. Rather our findings suggest that,similar to letter-to-phoneme correspondences, letter-to-syllable correspondences developinadequately in dyslexic readers.

In 1999, Wydell and Butterworth have raised two hypotheses according to which thetransparency and granularity of writing systems could have incidence on developmentaldyslexia. The authors assume that developmental dyslexia should not manifest itself inlanguages in which orthography-to-phonology relationships are transparent (transparenthypothesis) or are at the word level (granularity hypothesis). Their main evidence supportingboth hypotheses comes from a case study of an English–Japanese bilingual with monolin-gual dyslexia confined to English only. Our present study examined developmental dyslexiain French language, which is more transparent than English (Ziegler, Jacobs, & Stone, 1996)but with orthography-to-phonology relationships at the level of grapheme and phonemeunits. According to the granularity hypothesis of Wydell and Butterworth (1999), orthogra-phy French should lead to a high incidence of dyslexia, as the granularity of the smallestorthographic unit representing sound is finer than the whole word. Here we show that Frenchdyslexics have impaired spelling-to-sound correspondences even at a coarser level unit suchas syllables. Our finding is therefore consistent with the hypotheses of Wydell andButterworth (1999) and suggests that, if developmental dyslexia occurs for one specificlanguage, the phonological deficit would occur in fine and large spelling-to-soundcorrespondences.

The two primary findings of our investigation of the phonological and orthographicprocessing abilities of French developmental dyslexics were that dyslexics had impairedaccess to phonological syllable units from letters while having a preserved sensitivity todistributional properties of written language. These results suggest that future readingremediation is possible in dyslexic individuals. Learning to read requires the isolation ofvisual units in written language and phonological units in speech, and their association. Wefound that dyslexics have the ability to encode statistical orthographic properties, allowingthe isolation of visual units. Distributional properties of written language may therefore formthe basis of word parsing. According to orthographic redundancy, written syllable units asbigrams that straddle syllable boundaries are generally less frequent than bigrams includedwithin the syllables (Adams, 1979, 1981; Seidenberg, 1987). The visual units perceived bydyslexic children from letter co-occurrences frequently coincide with syllable units.Regarding the phonological units, the linguistic status hypothesis (Treiman & Zukowski,1996; see also Ziegler & Goswami, 2005 for a similar proposal) assumes a developmentalprogression by which sound units in spoken words become consciously accessible tobeginning readers, with syllables being earlier and more easily accessible than smaller unitssuch as phonemes. Few studies to date have examined the availability of phonologicalsyllables units in developmental dyslexia, with some reporting that developmental dyslexics


exhibited syllable auditory discrimination (Paul, Bott, Heim, Wienbruch, & Elbert, 2006),syllable tapping (Swan & Goswami, 1997), and spoken syllable processing (de Gelder &Vroomen, 1996) (but see Morais, Cluytens, & Alegria, 1984). Accordingly, reading reme-diation should focus on the connection between available visual and phonological units thatare written and spoken syllables. Such computer-assisted remediation programs focusing onsyllable units have been recently used in children with reading disabilities (poor readers anddyslexics) using transparent orthographies (Ecalle, Magnan, & Calmus, 2009 in French;Jiménez et al., 2007 in Spanish) and have successfully contributed to improving phonolog-ical decoding.

Our findings provide further insights into the results of neuroimaging studies in individ-uals with dyslexia. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fIRM) and event-relatedpotentials, visual word recognition has been associated with the activation of the leftoccipito-temporal region (i.e., the visual word form area). The Local CombinationDetector model of the visual word form area (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier,2005) suggests that orthographic redundancy may be encoded by groups of neurons thatbecome attuned to fragments of writing. Two fIRM studies demonstrated the sensitivity ofthis region to the probability of letter sequences (In English, Binder, Medler, Westbury,Liebenthal, & Buchanan, 2006; In French, Vinckier, Dehaene, Jobert, Dubus, Sigman, &Cohen, 2007). No study to date has investigated the activation of the visual word form areain the function of orthographic redundancy in individuals with developmental dyslexia, buttwo recent results have provided evidence for dysfunction of the visual word form system inthese individuals. A comparison of the processing of letter strings and visual control stimuliin dyslexic and control children found that the former exhibited reduced print-specific tuning(Maurer et al., 2007; Van der Mark et al., 2009). Further, examination of occipito-temporalactivation in response to three letter-string types (words, pseudowords, and pseudohomo-phones) showed that dyslexics were not sensitive to orthographic familiarity (Van der Market al., 2009). Our behavioral results suggest that, even if developmental dyslexia is associ-ated with impaired specialization of the visual word form system, dyslexics have a sufficientsensory experience of letter strings to learn the statistical regularities of printed language andto use them to parse letter strings in sublexical units.

Finally, two limitations of the present experiment should be acknowledged andaddressed. First, the present study only used a reading level match design. Backman,Mamen, & Ferguson (1984) have advocated experiments that combine both reading leveland chronological age matching (see also Vellutino & Scanlon, 1989). This issue may beaddressed by referring to previous data reported in a large sample of normal reader childrenfrom 7 to 11.2 years (Doignon & Zagar, 2006). No developmental difference was foundbetween young and older children: reading units were defined by both phonological syllableand orthographic redundancy. As noted in the introduction, similar data were also found innormal reader adults (Doignon & Zagar, 2005). Therefore the pattern of illusory conjunc-tions observed in the present dyslexic group does not reflect any pattern observed in olderchildren. The results of dyslexics can reasonably be interpreted as an evidence of animpaired phonological processing and an efficient orthographic processing. A secondlimitation of our study is that a few findings were marginally or not significant in theanalysis by items. This may be largely attributed to the small number of items in the presentstudy (e.g., ten items per condition). There were two reasons that constrained us to select asmall number of experimental items. The illusory conjunction task requires attention to bemaintained and children cannot perform such a task for a long period. Moreover, thecharacteristics of the illusory conjunction paradigm impose limitation on the number ofstimuli per condition: the task requires a practice phase with at least 20 items and an


experimental phase in which each stimulus is presented twice in both display condition toallow computation of preservation and violation errors for each item.

Conclusions

To conclude, the present study reports that French developmental dyslexics haveefficient orthographic processing skills but impaired phonological processing skills.The phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia extended to letter-to-syllable corre-spondences, as phonological syllables did not bias illusory conjunctions. The ability ofdevelopmental dyslexics to parse a word into reading units depends on the frequency ofthe letter groups that compose the syllable and that straddle the syllable boundary. Sucha result clearly shows that dyslexics are able to encode statistical orthographic propertiesof written language.

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Evidence for a preserved sensitivity to orthographic redundancy and an impaired access to phonological syllables in French developmental dyslexics

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