Séverine Casalis

• Professor (Full) at Université de Lille, France

This study aimed to evaluate the impact of static gesture cues on word learning and integration. Following embodied theories of language, gesture-enhanced images displaying the object-use gesture should favor learning and integration of object nouns. Sixty-two adult French speakers learned low-familiarity French nouns of manipulable objects (e.g.,...

This is the pre-print of a paper currently in press at Scientific Studies of Reading.

Background/Objectives: The present study examines the role of morphemic units in the initial word recognition stage among beginning readers. We assess whether and to what extent sublexical units, such as morphemes, are used in processing French words and how their use varies with reading proficiency. Methods: Two experiments were conducted to inves...

The current study aimed to fill the gap in research on factors predictive of word reading in French-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) by finding out whether the same predictors of written word recognition evidenced in typically developing children would be retrieved in children with DLD or if some predictors could be spec...

Visual–verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the...

Previous research has shown that languages from nearby families are easier to learn as second languages (L2) than languages from more distant families, attributing this difference to the presence of shared elements between the native language (L1) and L2. Building on this idea, we hypothesised that suffixes present in L1 might facilitate complex wo...

In the past decade, research on bilingual visual word recognition has given rise to a new line of study focusing on a sublexical orthographic variable referred to as orthographic markedness, derived from the comparison of the two orthotactic distributions known by a bilingual reader. Orthographic markers have been shown to speed up language decisio...

Aims/Objectives: According to Multilink, words from the first (L1) and (L2) second languages share a common store and their access is non-selective. Thus, the presentation of a target word activates in parallel lexical candidates from both languages that share form and semantic overlap. The degree of words’ activation also depends on their resting...

Morphological awareness contributes to vocabulary acquisition and reading in bilingual children who learned English after their native language. In line with these considerations, we further investigated L2 processing in late adult bilinguals where questions related to morphology need to be clarified. French-English speakers (N = 92) were assessed...

Les études sur l'apprentissage d'une langue seconde (L2) ne tiennent souvent compte que d'une seule modalité au cours des tâches expérimentales. Or, l’apprentissage d’une L2 a majoritairement lieu en contexte scolaire (bilinguisme tardif), principalement via des supports écrits. Notre étude questionne donc l’impact de la modalité, notamment sur la...

Research in second language (L2) learning often considers one modality only during task completion. It is unclear if L2 performance is as accurate whatever the modality. L2 learning at school is characterized by a predominance of written materials. One might expect written L2 word recognition to be more accurate than spoken one. This modality effec...

The present study explored whether emergent bilingual children showed enhanced abilities to learn L3 vocabulary including written, spoken and conceptual forms compared to monolinguals, and the impact of L2/L3 cross-language similarities on such an effect. To this end, we contrasted the English word learning performance of French fifth-graders atten...

This experiment was designed to investigate conceptual links directly through a word–picture matching task in children. Participants were asked to indicate between two pictures the one depicting the same concept as the newly learned L2 word (target). One of the two pictures was the target, while the other was either semantically related to it or wa...

The aim of the study was to investigate both L2 word integration and the effect of learning method on it. For this purpose, an L2 word-learning paradigm was designed with two learning methods: L2 words were paired with videos in the first one and their translation-equivalent L1 words in the second. To test L2 word integration, a lexical decision ta...

Background In addition to phonological processing and vocabulary, morphological awareness has been clearly identified as contributing to learning to read. While the impact of socio‐economic status (SES) has been identified for both phonological processing and vocabulary, less is known about the SES influence on morphological awareness and its relat...

Purpose: This study aims to assess written word recognition in French-speaking children with severe developmental language disorder (DLD), using a task of reading in silence. The objective is to determine if the balance between the phonological reading route and the orthographic route of these children is similar to that of typically developing ch...

In the present study, the frequency effect was examined specifically in text reading in developing and expert readers. Third graders, fifth graders, and expert readers read the same short text containing high- and low-frequency words while their eye movements were recorded. The frequency effect was observed in temporal and spatial measures of eye m...

This study aimed to investigate phonological activation during silent word reading in French adolescents learning English as a second language (L2) at secondary school. Grade 6 and Grade 8 adolescents performed lexical decision tasks in English, where we compared processing of nonwords that were homophonic to real L2 words (i.e., pseudohomophones [...

The article presents a summary of the work conducted in French, evaluating the impact of morphology in literacy development. Studies have shown a link between morphological awareness and the level of reading achievement, regardless of phonological awareness. The analysis of the mechanisms of word recognition shows not only 2nd or 3rd graders’ sensi...

Previous research has reported that lexical access in bilinguals is language non-selective. In the present study, we explored the extent to which cross-language orthographic neighborhood size (N-size) effects, an index of language non-selectivity, should be dissociated from markedness effects, a sub-lexical orthographic variable referring to the de...

This study aimed to investigate grapheme coding during silent word reading in French developing readers from Grades 3 and 5. Children performed a letter detection task in which three conditions were used; the letter to detect was (a) presented as a single-letter grapheme (simple condition; A in phare), (b) embedded within a multi-letter grapheme th...

Recent studies have suggested that proficient bilinguals show morphological decomposition in the L2, but the question remains as to whether this process is modulated by the cognateness of the morphemic constituents of L2 words and by L2 proficiency. To answer this question was the main goal of the present research. For that purpose, a masked primin...

Graphical illustration of the co-occurrence of segmentation and translation account. Inputs per word-type are in English (L2): BCSC (preacher, meaning pregador in EP [L1]); BNCSC (player, meaning jogador); BCSNC (dancer, meaning dançarino); and BNCSNC (header, meaning cabeçalho). B stands for Base, S stands for Suffix, C stands for Cognate and NC s...

The article presents a summary of the work conducted in French, evaluating the impact of morphology in literacy development. Studies have shown a link between morphological awareness and the level of reading achievement, regardless of phonological awareness. The analysis of the mechanisms of word recognition shows not only 2nd or 3rd graders' sensi...

In their paper, Kolinski and Morais argue that learning to read shapes cognition, modifying, for example the way we process oral language and we reason. From the learning to read point of view, this perspective has led to a refinement of our approach of causality in reading impairment such as dyslexia. As a result, numerous so-called prerequesites...

This study investigated the phonological contribution during visual word recognition in child readers as a function of general reading expertise (third and fifth grades) and specific word exposure (frequent and less-frequent words). An intermodal priming in lexical decision task was performed. Auditory primes (identical and unrelated) were used in...

Developmental dyxlexia and dysorthographia often meets resistance to rehabilitation and difficulties in phonological coding, reading and spelling frequently persist throughout an individual's life. Therefore, remediation strategies need to be developed to help these children use types of information other than lexical-phonological information. In t...

This work aimed to investigate grapheme coding during sub-lexical processing and lexical access. Using the letter detection task in Experiment 1, we compared letter pairs that could be considered as a grapheme unit or not depending on context (referred to as weakly cohesive complex, e.g. an in chant vs. cane) to real two-letter graphemes (highly co...

A recent study in isolated word reading (Khelifi et al., 2015) reported that word identification was facilitated in developing readers when a target was preceded parafoveally by a full preview (a preview containing all the target letters) but not by a partial preview (a preview containing only the first three letters of the target). While this resu...

Du fait des liens linguistiques étroits entre le langage oral et le langage écrit (Zesiger, Brun, & Nanchen, 2004), les enfants souffrant ou ayant souffert de troubles d’articulation, de parole et/ou de langage oral présentent, à des degrés divers, des risques d’apprentissage du langage écrit, notamment au niveau de la lecture (McArthur, Hogben, Ed...

Previous masked-priming research has shown automatic phonological activation during visual word recognition in monolingual skilled-adult readers. Activation also occurs across languages in bilingual adult readers, suggesting that the activation of phonological representations is not language-specific. Less is known about developing readers: first,...

A high comorbidity between reading and arithmetic disabilities has already been reported. The present study aims at identifying more precisely patterns of arithmetic performance in children with developmental dyslexia, defined with severe and specific criteria. By means of a standardized test of achievement in mathematics ( Calculation and Number P...

The present study aimed to investigate the development of automatic phonological processes involved in visual word recognition during reading acquisition in French. A visual masked priming lexical decision experiment was carried out with third, fifth graders and adult skilled readers. Three different types of partial overlap between the prime and t...

Résumé Les enfants avec un trouble spécifique d’articulation, de parole et/ou de langage oral résorbé ou persistant, présentent, à des degrés divers, des risques de difficultés d’apprentissage de la lecture. Cette revue critique de la littérature présente les caractéristiques des capacités de lecture de ces enfants, pour ce qui concerne la reconnai...

Spelling is a challenge for individuals with dyslexia. Phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence rules are highly inconsistent in French, which make them very difficult to master, in particular for dyslexics. One recurrent manifestation of this inconsistency is the presence of silent letters at the end of words. Many of these silent letters perform a morp...

Most studies in adults with developmental dyslexia have focused on identifying the deficits responsible for their persistent reading difficulties, but little is known on how these readers manage the intensive exposure to written language required to obtain a university degree. The main objective of this study was to identify certain skills, and spe...

Two longitudinal studies of word reading, spelling, and reading comprehension identified commonalities and differences in morphophonemic orthographies—French (Study 1, n = 1,313) or English (Study 2, n = 114) in early childhood (Grade 2)and middle childhood (Grade 5). For French and English, statistically significant concurrent relationships among...

Previous research has repeatedly revealed evidence for morpho-orthographic priming effects in suffixed words. However, evidence for the morphological chunking of prefixed words is sparse and ambiguous. The goal of the present study was to directly contrast the processing of prefixed and suffixed pseudowords within the same experiment. We carried ou...

Developing readers have been shown to rely on morphemes in visual word recognition across several naming, lexical decision and priming experiments. However, the impact of morphology in reading is not consistent across studies with differing results emerging not only between but also within writing systems. Here, we report a cross-language experimen...

We investigated whether children with dyslexia rely on derivational morphology during visual word recognition and how the semantic and form properties of morphemes influence this processing. We conducted two masked priming experiments, in which we manipulated the semantic overlap (Experiment 1) and the form overlap (Experiment 2) between morphologi...

One key finding in support of the hypothesis that written words are automatically parsed into component morphemes independently of the true morphological structure of the stimuli, so-called morpho-orthographic segmentation, is that suffixed nonword primes facilitate the visual recognition of a stem target (rapidifier-RAPIDE) whereas non-suffixed pr...

Grapheme coding was examined in French Grade 6 and Grade 8 children and adults who learned English as a second language (L2). In Experiments 1 and 2, three conditions were compared in a letter detection task in L2: (1) simple grapheme (i.e., detect “a” in black); (2) complex language-shared grapheme (i.e., “a” in brain) and (3) complex L2-specific...

Children with specific language impairment frequently encounter difficulties in learning to read and in particular, in word recognition. The present study set out to determine the precise impact of language impairment on word reading skills. We investigated single-word reading in 27 French children with specific speech and language impairment (2SLI...

Little is yet known about how L2 learners process morphology during visual word recognition. Two points of view may be contrasted: the first one suggests that L2 learners, as less proficient speakers, may be less sensitive to the computational aspects of word processing such as the morphological structure of complex words, relying more on lexical i...

We report two experiments that investigated whether phonological and/or orthographic shifts in a base word interfere with morphological processing by French 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders and adults (as a control group) along the time course of visual word recognition. In both experiments, prime-target pairs shared four possible relationships: morpholog...

Use of morphologically related words often helps in selecting among spellings of sounds in French. For instance, final /wa/ may be spelled oi (e.g., envoi "sendoff"), oit (e.g., exploit "exploit"), ois (e.g., siamois, "siamese"), or oie (e.g., joie "joy"). The morphologically complex word exploiter "to exploit", with a pronounced t, can be used to...

Ce ouvrage, né du travail d'un collectif d'auteurs, constitue une synthèse détaillée des questions et des données qui émanent de travaux récents dans le domaine de l'acquisition de la lecture. Pratique et accessible, il se compose de 5 chapitres : Apprendre à lire : quelques repères, Lecture et habiletés reliées à la lecture dans la dyslexie, Lectu...

Présentation Savoir lire constitue une condition essentielle d'intégration professionnelle et sociale. Néanmoins, en France, comme le rapportent des évaluations nationales et internationales, entre 12 % et 20 % d'enfants ou d'adolescents présentent des difficultés relativement importantes de lecture. Cette population de lecteurs en difficulté est t...

Reading aloud in children with specific language impairment The study of reading aloud skills in 27 children with specific language impairment compared to 27 control children with the same reading level shows an average delay of 3; 6 years and a specific deficit of the phonological reading procedure. At the individual level, four reading profiles a...

This study examined syntactic comprehension in French children with dyslexia in both listening and reading. In the first syntactic comprehension task, a partial version of the Epreuve de Compréhension syntaxico-sémantique (ECOSSE test; French adaptation of Bishop's test for receptive grammar test) children with dyslexia performed at a lower level i...

This paper aims at examining orthographic coding assessment in dyslexic children. This field is very few explored in dyslexia, models of experts readers serve as reference, as well as studies conducted in developing normal reader. We make some propositions for studying orthographic coding and report results of a preliminary study evidencing some sp...

Morphological processing by French children was investigated in two experiments. The first showed that second and third graders read pseudowords such as chat-ure (cat-ish) composed of an illegally combined real stem and real derivational suffix faster and more accurately than they read matched pseudowords composed of a pseudostem and a real derivat...

En premier lieu, le chapitre se penche sur la définition des troubles spécifiques du langage oral (TSLO) et sur leurs caractéristiques. Il soulève les problèmes liés à cette définition, tout particulièrement la question des critères de pathologie et la notion de spécificité des troubles. Le deuxième point présente les résultats de suivis à long ter...

This study aimed at examining sensitivity to lateral linguistic and nonlinguistic information in third and fifth grade readers. A word identification task with a threshold was used, and targets were displayed foveally with or without distractors. Sensitivity to lateral information was inferred from the deterioration of the rate of correct word iden...

This study examined the relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. We show that French children in Grades 3 and 4 appear to use morphological information in spelling; spelling of sounds for which there are several alternatives was more accurate in derived than in nonderived words. The link between morphological awareness and spellin...

The links between oral morphological awareness and the use of derivational morphology are examined in the English word recognition of 8-year-old good and poor readers. Morphological awareness was assessed by a sentence completion task. The role of morphological structure in lexical access was examined by manipulating the presence of embedded words...

Three visual priming experiments using three different prime durations (60ms in Experiment 1, 250ms in Experiment 2, and 800ms in Experiment 3) were conducted to examine which properties of morphemes (form and/or meaning) drive developing readers' processing of written morphology. French third, fifth, and seventh graders and adults (the latter as a...

This study explores the nature of orthographic processing skills among French-speaking children in Grades 6 and 8 who are learning English at school as a second language (L2). Two aspects of orthographic processing skills are thought to form a convergent construct in monolingual beginning readers: word-specific knowledge (e.g. rain-rane) and sensit...

We examined whether French third- and fifth-grade children rely on morphemes when recognizing words and whether this reliance depends on word familiarity. We manipulated the presence of bases and suffixes in words and pseudowords to compare their contribution in a lexical decision task. Both bases and suffixes facilitated word reading accuracy and...

Les recherches menées sur la reconnaissance des mots s’inscrivent dans le domaine de la psycholinguistique, discipline dont l’objectif est d’étudier les processus psychologiques qui sous-tendent la compréhension et la production du langage humain. Apparue dans les années 1950, elle a émergé de façon concomitante à la révolution cognitive, initiée n...

This study investigated the reading and reading-related skills of 15 French-speaking adults with dyslexia, whose performance was compared with that of chronological-age controls (CA) and reading-level controls (RL). Experiment 1 assessed the efficiency of their phonological reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term memory,...

This study examined the pattern of results on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-IV; French version) for 60 French children with dyslexia, from 8 to 16 years of age. Although use of WISC-III failed to clearly identify typical profiles and cognitive deficits in dyslexia, WISC-IV offers an opportunity to reach these objectives with ne...

Semantic priming was analysed in two groups of French children contrasted on comprehension skills with a visual lexical-decision task using a long SOA (800 ms). Two relation types between related primes and targets were examined: pure semantic relation (categorical vs. functional), and lexical association strength (strong vs. weak). Targets were pr...

This article presents a synthesis of studies conducted on word recognition processes in dyslexic children. The deficit in the phonological procedure affects most of dyslexics, with variation of severity. Methods of the orthographic procedure assessment are discussed. In all, if dyslexic children rely on lexical information, use of paradigm based on...

This study aimed at examining sensitivity to lateral linguistic and nonlinguistic information in third and fifth grade readers. A word identification task with a threshold was used, and targets were displayed fov- eally with or without distractors. Sensitivity to lateral information was inferred from the deterioration of the rate of correct word id...

A growing corpus of evidence suggests that morphology could play a role in reading acquisition, and that young readers could be sensitive to the morphemic structure of written words. In the present experiment, we examined whether and when morphological information is activated in word recognition. French fourth graders made visual lexical decisions...

This cross-linguistic comparison of metalinguistic development in French and English examines early ability to manipulate derivational suffixes in oral language games as a function of chronological age, receptive vocabulary, and year of schooling. Data from judgment and production tasks are presented for children aged between 5 and 8 years in their...