Jean Ecalle

• Professor Emeritus
• Professor Emeritus at University of Lyon2

Recent studies suggest that benefiting early from both a cochlear implant (CI) and exposure to cued speech (CS, support system for the perception of oral language) positively impacts deaf children’s speech perception, speech intelligibility, and reading. This study aims to show how: 1/CS-based speech perception (“cue reading”), and speech intelligi...

We studied the effect of the number and characteristics of siblings (sex, age) on school achievement in several grades (kindergarten, first grade, and fifth grade), in two large French cohorts, with more than 16,000 children. Running linear mixed-effects models, we find that, independently of socioeconomic status, having more siblings is negatively...

Purpose. The aim is to determine the number of comprehenders profiles in a large-scale study with French first graders (7 y-o) by distinguishing literal (Lit) and inferential (Inf) processes (Oakhill & Cain, 2007). Few studies have specifically investigated reading comprehension (RC) performance in first grade (Massonnié et al., 2019). Research has...

Cette recherche analyse les habiletés en littéracie émergente et en lecture de la cohorte d’enfants scolarisés en CP de l’Etude Longitudinale Française depuis l’enfance (ELFE). L'objectif est double : (1) faire un état des lieux des profils d’apprentis lecteurs (N=14 470) ; (2) examiner les relations entre les dispositifs d’aide et les performances...

A 7-year longitudinal study was conducted as part of the French national cohort ELFE ( N = 1095). The aim was to identify how and why early language skills at 2 years might predict later literacy skills assessed successively at 5, 7, and 9 years (LitSk5y; 7y; 9y). Using one and the same model, we also examined the relations between literacy skills...

As part of the French national cohort ELFE, a two-year longitudinal study was conducted and children’s literacy skills were assessed twice (N = 2,767), namely at the end of preschool (t1) and at the end of Grade 1 (t2). At t1, letter-name knowledge (LNK), phonological skills (PhoSk) and vocabulary were assessed and at t2, phonemic segmentation, wor...

We studied the effect of the number and characteristics of siblings (sex and age), on school achievement in numeracy and literacy from kindergarten to 5th grade, in two large French cohorts (the Elfe cohort, more than 4,400 children, and the DEPP panel, more than 9,500 children). Running linear mixed effects models, we find that, independently of s...

The aims of the present study are: (1) to examine the contribution that vocabulary makes to reading comprehension in the Simple View of Reading model in French-speaking children aged from 7 to 10 years based on the use of an index of efficiency (i.e., speed-accuracy index); and (2) to investigate the extent to which the contribution of vocabulary t...

This article is a systematic review of summer reading programs from 2012 to 2021 and provides a synthesis of 16 articles on summer programs in children from prekindergarten through Grade 8 together with several individual and environmental characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status, the language of learning, reading and/or behavioral disabilities)...

This study investigated the relationship between code related-skills (i.e., letter knowledge, phonological skills, word/pseudoword reading) and language related-skills (i.e., vocabulary, listening comprehension) on reading skills (i.e., fluency and reading comprehension) in a four time-points longitudinal study in French speaking children from kind...

L’écriture de mots nécessite l’acquisition du code alphabétique et la maîtrise du geste graphique. L’objectif de cette étude est d’évaluer avec des enfants de 5 ans : (1) l’effet du feedback visuel dans l’exploration motrice des lettres sur le tracé de lettres ; (2) l’effet du développement des processus moteurs sur la transcription de pseudo-mots....

Cette étude longitudinale présente l’examen de données de 2767 enfants suivis sur deux ans, évalués en littéracie précoce à 4 ans (HabLit4a) puis en lecture à 6 ans (HabLec6a). HabLit4a a été évaluée à partir de trois épreuves, connaissance du nom des lettres, habiletés phonologiques et vocabulaire, et HabLec6a avec quatre épreuves, segmentation ph...

Vocabulary is a complex intermediate component between oral and written language, which the influence on associated skills and general language abilities (e.g., decoding processing, comprehension) has been largely studied in children, suggesting its important role in literacy. The main aim of this article is to review some questions on vocabulary a...

The purpose of this pilot study is to construct a new computerized French language vocabulary assessment test for elementary school children. Multiple choice tasks measuring vocabulary breadth (e.g., image) and depth (e.g., synonym, definition) were administered to 255 children. The speed and accuracy of responses were recorded. As expected, analys...

The aim of this research was to provide to eight children with Down Syndrome a syllable-processing software program that drew their attention to phonological and orthographic syllables. The children participated in a 10-hour training course (spread over 5 weeks) that used an experimental design with four assessment sessions, the first two of which...

The aim of the present study was to demonstrate the multisensory nature of vocabulary knowledge by using learning designed to encourage the simulation of sensorimotor experiences. Forty participants were instructed to learn pseudowords together with arbitrary definitions, either by mentally experiencing (sensorimotor simulation) the definitions, or...

We evaluate the effects of multisensory training on letters, including sonification of graphic symbols. We used “spatial sonification” where letter handwriting movements recorded in a two dimensional plan, vertical and horizontal, are systematically assigned to two acoustic features, spectral composition for the horizontal axis and frequency for th...

Embodied Cognition and Education: How Does the Sensorimotor Experience Stimulate the Learning of Reading-Writing? Several teaching methods intuitively include the sensorimotor exploration into learning. In order to develop an evidence-based teaching practice, the aim of this synthesis is to demonstrate the role of sensorimotor exploration on the le...

The aim is to examine the impact of interventions on fluency and reading comprehension and how the effects of these interventions depend on the time that teachers spend with children with reading difficulties. Two groups were involved: an experimental group (n = 600) trained in code-related skills and a control group (n = 597) that received no inte...

A tablet application was designed to assess children’s receptive vocabulary in French using a classical four-choice picture paradigm and 240 words which varied in word frequency. Results showed (1) an effect of socio-demographic zone, with lower correct response scores and longer reaction times for children in disadvantaged areas, (2) an effect of...

The integration of newcomer migrant children is a vital challenge for host countries. For such children, learning to read in a new language is a prerequisite for the acquisition of knowledge in all academic domains at school. To investigate this issue, two experiments were conducted: one with children who were just at the beginning of learning to r...

Two large samples were assessed twice in Grade 1: the control group (Cont; N = 2302), which received no specific interventions, and the experimental group (Exp; N = 484), which received interventions associated with code-related skills (decoding and fluency). We estimated that a mean score of around 50 correctly read words per minute corresponded t...

The aim of this study is to propose advantages provided by computerized tools when assessing reading ability. A new computer-based reading assessment evaluating both word reading and reading comprehension processes was administered to 687 children in primary (N=400) and secondary (N=287) schools. Accuracy (weighted scores) and speed of access (resp...

Introduction: Preschool children develop early literacy skills that are predictive of their reading acquisition.Purpose of research: This study aims to use a short screening tool to examine emergent literacy performances. It includes 4-5-year-old children (N = 14,820) schooled in public and private schools in France. A number of public schools are...

In a large-scale study conducted in 4- to 5-year-old French-speaking preschoolers ( N = 12,162), early literacy skills were assessed with four short tasks designed to investigate three domains related to learning to read: letter knowledge, phonological skills, and vocabulary. This tool was developed in response to the lack of available literacy scr...

Introduction. – Several studies have shown that adults can memorize an audio-visual association inresponse to an incidental presentation. Moreover, a motor experience of the letter-shape promotes letterknowledge and reading acquisition. Objective. – In order to develop optimal learning designs for children, we evaluate the effect of the implicitlea...

In two large-scale studies, the effects of policy and educational interventions on literacy skills were examined in children schooled in zones with specific educational needs. To calculate the potential effects of such interventions, treatment-effects estimators with nearest neighbor matching were used. In Study 1 with policy intervention (N = 1095...

Fundamental research has indicated that (a) difficulties in reading are linked to a deficit in phonemic awareness and word reading and (b) in French, decoding and word reading are based on the syllable as a functional unit. A software program involving two tasks, namely, phonemic discrimination and grapho-syllabic segmentation, was proposed to poor...

Ce travail vise à préciser les difficultés en compréhension de lecture d’enfants porteurs de troubles du spectre autistique sans déficience intellectuelle (TSA sans DI). Dix enfants TSA sans DI ont été évalués en identification de mots écrits et en compréhension orale et écrite (littérale, inférentielle de cohésion et basée sur les connaissances) à...

Reading difficulties in school are very challenging for teachers due to many different reader subtypes in one and the same class. Moreover, there are few easy-to-use tools enabling teachers to assess reading ability. According to the Simple View of Reading (Hoover and Gough in Reading and Writing, 2(2), 127–160, 1990), efficient reading comprehensi...

The goal of the experiment was to examine the relevance of a new French web-based assessment, Tinfolec (Test INFOrmatisé d’évaluation de la LECture), the aim of which is to evaluate the reading abilities of children in primary grades. The participants were 1,016 children from Grades 2 to 5. They completed the five tasks of Tinfolec designed to asse...

The aim of this study was to investigate how age at cochlear implantation (CI) and age at exposure to Cued Speech (CS, Manual system that resolves the ambiguity inherent lipreading) could impact literacy skills in deaf children. Ninety deaf children fitted with CI (early vs late) and exposed to CS (early vs late) from primary schools (from Grade 2...

Today, it is accepted that, in a majority of children with dyslexia, reading disorders result, at the cognitive level, from mental representation deficit and/or speech sound processing deficit. The low level of performance of a sub-type of children with dyslexia, obtained from the conventional tests assessing phonological skills, provides evidence...

Three subgroups of poor readers were identified within a sample of French 2nd Graders (n = 258): children with Specific Decoding Difficulty (SDD), children with Specific Comprehension Difficulty (SCD) and children with General Reading Difficulty (GRD). We first compared them on skills related to either decoding or comprehension (or to both reading...

Il y a près d'un siècle, Maria Montessori, médecin et pédagogue italienne se fit connaître pour avoir développé "l'éveil sensoriel", un ensemble de techniques d'enseignement qui favorisaient les apprentissages scolaires chez le jeune enfant. Cette approche intuitive a fait l'objet de développements ultérieurs amenant plus récemment des chercheurs,...

The aim of this study was to investigate the early characteristics of four profiles of readers established in second grade (7–8 years of age): good readers, specific poor de-coders, specific poor comprehenders and general poor readers. These profiles were compared retrospectively on a range of measures administered 2 years earlier, in kindergarten....

L’utilisation des technologies informatisées dans les apprentissages scolaires et en particulier pour la lecture fait actuellement l’objet de nombreux travaux. L’objectif de cet article est de présenter des exemples d’applications sur tablettes tactiles pour aider les enfants en difficulté dans l’apprentissage de la lecture. Après en avoir décrit l...

RESUME : L’utilisation des technologies informatisées dans les apprentissages scolaires et en particulier pour la lecture fait actuellement l’objet de nombreux travaux. L’objectif de cet article est de présenter des exemples d’applications sur tablettes tactiles pour aider les enfants en difficulté dans l’apprentissage de la lecture. Après en avoir...

We aim to present the development and the validation of two software programmes: one to train children in decoding and word recognition and the other one for comprehension. They are based on recent theoretical hypotheses, one stipulating that syllable are important units for reading words in French and the other one underlining that reading compreh...

We aim to present the development and the validation of two software programmes: one to train children in decoding and word recognition and the other one for comprehension. They are based on recent theoretical hypotheses, one stipulating that syllable are important units for reading words in French and the other one underlining that reading compreh...

L’objectif est de présenter l’élaboration et la validation de deux logiciels d’aide à la lecture correspondant aux deux composantes de la lecture, l’identification de mots écrits et la compréhension. Ils sont basés sur des hypothèses théoriques récentes concernant pour l’un, le rôle des unités syllabiques comme unités intermédiaires et fondamentale...

This study conducted with deaf teenagers fitted with cochlear implants shows that (1): their reading skills (particularly in reading comprehension of sentences and text) and associated abilities (vocabulary and print exposure) are significantly lower than those of their hearing peers; (2) the age of application of intervention techniques (implants...

This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were differentiated:...

Reading is the product of Decoding and Comprehension (Hoover & Gough, 1990). Letter knowledge, phonological skills, vocabulary and oral comprehension are the best predictors of subsequent good reading skills (Elwer et al., 2013). Some children may be precociously identified as being at risk for reading difficulties. How to stimulate these disabled...

Traiter une structure phonologique qui n’existe pas dans une langue ou qui ne respecte pas les contraintes linguistiques a généralement pour conséquence une transformation, voire même une réparation de celle-ci. Pourtant, il demeure de nombreuses zones d’ombre sur ce qui influence ces deux processus. Notre étude proposait d’étudier ces phénomènes a...

Previously reported simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control suggest that the patterns of eye movements observed with children versus adult readers reflect differences in lexical processing proficiency. However, these simulations fail to specify precisely what aspect(s) of lexical processing (e.g., orthographic processing) acc...

L’aphasie consécutive à un accident vasculaire nécessite une prise en charge orthophonique intense afin d’optimiser la récupération des habiletés langagières des patients. Au vu de la demande accrue de consultations en France, il est difficile pour les orthophonistes d’assurer un suivi optimal à l’ensemble des patients. Nous présentons un nouveau l...

This study aims at identifying the effect of training in the acquisition of the alphabetic principle in 5-year-old children. We compared the effect of multisensory training of letters in visual, haptic, graphomotor, visuo-haptic, and visuo-graphomotor groups. For each training type, we contrasted trained versus untrained letters in reading and spel...

Listeners often misperceive speech contexts that contain unattested, ill-formed phonological sequences and repair them to create well-formed or close-to-native sequences. However, what guides the misperception and repair processes still has to be studied in depth. In the present study, French adults and typically-developing children were presented...

There is agreement that French typically reading children use syllable-sized units to seg-ment words. Although the statistical properties of the initial syllables or the clusters within syllable boundaries seem to be crucial for syllable segmentation, little is known about the role of consonant sonority in silent reading. In two experiments that us...

L'apprentissage de la lecture implique des processus d’identification de mots écrits dépendant pour partie de la connaissance des lettres, des habiletés phonologiques, et des processus de compréhension liés au vocabulaire et à la compréhension orale (Ecalle & Magnan, 2010). Comment stimuler ces connaissances précoces chez des enfants à risque de di...

The purpose of this study was to examine the differential impact of a computer-based comprehension training programme according to second graders' comprehender profiles. These profiles differed in the children's abilities to process three types of textual information: literal information, text-connecting inferences and gap-filling inferences. The r...

Introduction The aim of the study was to investigate reading comprehension skills in 7 to 10-year-old children and to present a new tool for assessing reading comprehension skills in elementary school children. Two aspects of text comprehension were assessed: literal comprehension skills and inference generation (with two subtypes of inferences, co...

Introduction. - The aim of the study was to investigate reading comprehension skills in 7 to 10-year-old children and to present a new tool for assessing reading comprehension skills in elementary schoolchildren. Two aspects of text comprehension were assessed: literal comprehension skills and inferencegeneration (with two subtypes of inferences, c...

RESUME : Le premier objectif de cette étude pilote est d’évaluer l’effet d’une exploration auditive et haptique des lettres sur la connaissance des lettres d’un enfant de 7 ans porteur de trisomie 21 comparé à un groupe d’enfants tout-venant de 3 ans apparié. Le second objectif vise à étudier les capacités de transferts intermodaux de l’enfant port...

Le premier objectif de ce travail, mené auprès de plus de 3000 élèves de grande section de maternelle, était de valider une batterie de tests évaluant les compétences prédictives de l'acquisition de la lecture dans ses deux composantes, identification de mots écrits et compréhension. Pour cela, les qualités métrologiques des épreuves expérimentales...

RESUME : Le premier objectif de cette étude pilote est d’évaluer l’effet d’une exploration auditive et haptique des lettres sur la connaissance des lettres d’un enfant de 7 ans porteur de trisomie 21 comparé à un groupe d’enfants tout-venant de 3 ans apparié. Le second objectif vise à étudier les capacités de transferts intermodaux de l’enfant port...

Two experiments examine the effects of two computer-based interventions, one with grapho-syllabic training (GST) and another with grapho-phonemic training (GPT) on the development of word recognition and reading comprehension in French children during Grade 1 and Grade 2. In Exp 1, poor readers (N = 27) in second grade were selected and divided int...

Computer-assisted learning is known to be an effective tool for improving learning in both adults and children. Recent years have seen the emergence of the so-called ‘serious games (SGs)’ that are flooding the educational games market. In this paper, the term ‘serious games’ is used to refer to video games (VGs) intended to serve a useful purpose....

This paper aims to investigate whether – and how – consonant sonority (obstruent vs. sonorant) and status (coda vs. onset) within syllable boundaries modulate the syllable-based segmentation strategies. Here, it is questioned whether French dyslexic children, who experience acoustic–phonetic (i.e., voicing) and phonological impairments, are sensiti...

This study examines the effects of a new CAI program designed to remediate text comprehension difficulties in less skilled comprehenders at the beginning of learning to read. In a randomized control trial design, two groups of second grade children experiencing comprehension difficulties were selected and trained using two CAI programs. One of thes...

Background: Only a small number of longitudinal studies have been conducted to assess the literacy skills of children with hearing impairment. The results of these studies are inconsistent with regard to the importance of phonology in reading acquisition as is the case in studies with hearing children. Colin, Magnan, Ecalle, and Leybaert (2007) re...

To date, the nature of the phonological deficit in developmental dyslexia is still debated. We concur with possible impairments in the representations of the universal phonological constraints that universally govern how phonemes co-occur as a source of this deficit. We were interested in whether-and how-dyslexic children have sensitivity to sonori...

This study was designed to examine whether a variety of cognitive and linguistic factors theoretically considered to be predictive of reading comprehension skills in elementary school children were also predictive of listening comprehension skills in 131 five-year-old children. The results showed that the predictors of young children's listening co...

RÉSUMÉ : Étude de l'effet d'une exploration auditive et haptique et des capacités de transfert intermodal sur l'apprentissage des lettres auprès d'un enfant porteur de trisomie 21. Approche comparative avec un groupe d'enfants tout-venant. Le premier objectif de cette étude pilote est d'évaluer l'effet d'une exploration auditive et haptique des let...

The first goal of this study, conducted among more than 3000 kindergarten children, was to validate a series of tests which assess predictive skills necessary to master reading in two main components, word recognition and language comprehension. For that purpose, measurements from experimental tasks in letter recognition, phonological skills, vocab...

Cette étude longitudinale examine l’influence des connaissances morphologiques et orthographiques mesurées en GSM, puis en CP, sur les performances ultérieures (CP-CE1) des enfants en lecture. Une série d’analyses de régression hiérarchique à ordre fixe a été réalisée en contrôlant d’autres variables dont les liens avec l’apprentissage de la lectur...

This article queries whether consonant sonority (sonorant vs. obstruent) and status (coda vs. onset) within intervocalic clusters influence syllable-based segmentation strategies. We used a modified version of the illusory conjunction paradigm to test whether French beginning, intermediate, and advanced readers were sensitive to an optimal “sonoran...

The present study had two aims: (1) to examine kindergarten (Kg) and first grade (G1) children’s early word structure knowledge, that is letter, phonological, morphological, and orthographic knowledge, and (2) to provide evidence of specific links between these various types of knowledge and word reading and spelling performance assessed in G1. A s...

Purpose In this study, the authors queried whether French-speaking children with dyslexia were sensitive to consonant sonority and position within syllable boundaries to influence a phonological syllable-based segmentation in silent reading. Method Participants included 15 French-speaking children with dyslexia, compared with 30 chronological age–...

This paper aims to investigate whether--and how--consonant sonority (obstruent vs. sonorant) and status (coda vs. onset) within syllable boundaries modulate the syllable-based segmentation strategies. Here, it is questioned whether French dyslexic children, who experience acoustic-phonetic (i.e., voicing) and phonological impairments, are sensitive...

RÉSUMÉ: L'objectif de l'étude est de déterminer le rôle d'une exploration séquentielle orientée des lettres sur le développement de la compréhension du principe alphabétique auprès d'enfants de 5 ans faibles connaisseurs de lettres. Une procédure classique pré-tests – entraînement – post-tests est utilisée. Les entraînements séquentiels diffèrent q...

The aim of the study is to determine the role of a sequential exploration of letters on the development of alphabetic principle comprehension with 5-years-old children with low letters knowledge level. A classical pre-test-training-post-test design is used. Sequential trainings differ according to the presence-absence of oriented exploration instru...

L’objectif de l’étude est de déterminer le rôle d’une exploration séquentielle orientée des lettres sur le développement de la compréhension du principe alphabétique auprès d’enfants de 5 ans faibles connaisseurs de lettres. Une procédure classique pré-tests – entraînement – post-tests est utilisée. Les entraînements séquentiels diffèrent quant à l...

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that sentence processing is an essential mediatory skill between word recognition and text comprehension in reading. In Experiment 1, a semantic similarity judgement task was used with children from Grade 2 to Grade 9. They had to say whether two written sentences had the same (or very similar)...

This study had two main aims: (a) to develop checklists adapted for the French culture and the age of the children whose level of print exposure (PE) was to be assessed and (b) to analyse the impact of print exposure on various literacy skills. The checklists consisted of Titles, Magazines, and Authors (targets and foils). The children's responses...

This study investigated the status of phonological representations in French dyslexic children (DY) compared with reading level- (RL) and chronological age-matched (CA) controls. We focused on the syllable's role and on the impact of French linguistic features. In Experiment 1, we assessed oral discrimination abilities of pairs of syllables that va...

Previous studies have suggested that children with specific language impairment (SLI) risk encountering subsequent literacy difficulties, due to difficulties in phonological awareness (PA). This longitudinal study provides evidence in support of this view based on a group of 20 French-speaking children with SLI examined at the start of learning to...

Implicit learning (IL), learning without awareness (Reber, 1989), is a robust phenomenon in typically developing children (Evans et al. 2009) and is proposed to be a basic biological trait that enables language learning (Tomasello, 2003). Recent studies suggest that IL may be impaired in children with specific language impairment (Evans et al. 2009...

Reading assessment should be completed with cognitive skills (memory and rapid automatized naming) and linguistic skills (particularly phonological domain) related to reading and learning to read. This review aims to present the importance of assessing in general and the two aspects of reading assessment in terms of screening and diagnosis. For scr...

Résumé Une évaluation complète de la lecture doit être accompagnée de celle des compétences cognitives (capacités mnésiques et de dénomination rapide) et langagières (phonologiques notamment) associées à la lecture et son apprentissage. Dans cette revue de questions, on présentera d’une part, les enjeux de l’évaluation en général et d’autre part, u...

RESUME : L’objectif est d’évaluer l’effet d’entraînements bimodaux sur la connaissance des lettres, l’écriture et la lecture des pseudomots auprès des enfants de trois et cinq ans. Un paradigme classique prétest – entraînement – post-test est utilisé. Les entraînements diffèrent sur l’exploration sensorielle des lettres (auditif/visuel [V] ; auditi...

The aim of this study was to examine the predictive links between children's sensitivity to phonological, morphological and orthographic word structure assessed in kindergarten and their reading and spelling performance obtained in first grade. Stepwise regression analyses identify here again, as in many other studies, phonological sensitivity as t...