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Reading Ability: Lexical Quality to Comprehension

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The lexical quality hypothesis (LQH) claims that variation in the quality of word representations has consequences for reading skill, including comprehension. High lexical quality includes well-specified and partly redundant representations of form (orthography and phonology) and flexible representations of meaning, allowing for rapid and reliable meaning retrieval. Low-quality representations lead to specific word-related problems in comprehension. Six lines of research on adult readers demonstrate some of the implications of the LQH. First, large-scale correlational results show the general interdependence of comprehension and lexical skill while identifying disassociations that allow focus on comprehension-specific skill. Second, word-level semantic processing studies show comprehension skill differences in the time course of form-meaning confusions. Studies of rare vocabulary learning using event-related potentials (ERPs) show that, third, skilled comprehenders learn new words more effectively and show stronger ERP indicators for memory of the word learning event and, fourth, suggest skill differences in the stability of orthographic representations. Fifth, ERP markers show comprehension skill differences in meaning processing of ordinary words. Finally, in text reading, ERP results demonstrate momentary difficulties for low-skill comprehenders in integrating a word with the prior text. The studies provide evidence that word-level knowledge has consequences for word meaning processes in comprehension.
... L'apprentissage de l'orthographe d'un mot serait favorisé lorsque le scripteur est en mesure d'encoder des informations de différentes natures à son sujet, comme sa forme orale, sa forme écrite ainsi que son sens (Apel, 2011;Apel et al., 2019;Perfetti, 2007;Perfetti, 2017). Lorsque le scripteur est familier avec la forme orale du mot, cela implique qu'il est en mesure de le prononcer, de le comprendre et d'en analyser les différentes composantes phonologiques qui le composent, comme les syllabes ou les phonèmes Nation, 2001). ...
... Il devient donc plus difficile pour lui de l'emmagasiner en mémoire ; d'où la pertinence d'enseigner non seulement l'orthographe des mots, mais aussi leur signification (Perfetti et Hart, 2002). Perfetti (2007; précise que plus le scripteur est en contact avec les différentes caractéristiques d'un mot, dont son sens et sa forme, plus sa représentation en mémoire serait de qualité. En effet, dès le début de l'apprentissage formel de l'écrit, la capacité de l'enfant à associer une forme orale à un sens donné lui permet d'accéder plus facilement à la représentation du mot qu'il veut écrire. ...
... En ajout aux approches formelles et informelles de l'apprentissage de l'orthographe, l'enseignement du sens des mots permettrait également à l'apprenant de développer une représentation orthographique du mot de plus grande qualité dans la mesure où la forme du mot (à l'oral ou à l'écrit) doit nécessairement être associée à un sens (Álvarez-Cañizo et al., 2019;Ouellette, 2010;van Rijthoven et al., 2018). Plus l'individu fait des liens entre les informations associées à la forme orale du mot, à la forme écrite et au sens pouvant se rattacher au mot à apprendre, plus le mot en question serait bien représenté mentalement (Nation, 2001, Perfetti, 2007. Dans cet article, une attention particulière sera accordée à l'enseignement formel de l'orthographe grâce à un enseignement de certains phénomènes visuo-orthographiques des mots et à l'enseignement du sens propre à chaque mot. ...
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La majorité des erreurs commises en orthographe lexicale par les élèves du primaire sont associées à la production des phonèmes multigraphémiques et des lettres muettes non porteuses de sens. Pour documenter les meilleures façons d’enseigner ces phénomènes orthographiques, deux conditions expérimentales ont été mises à l’essai auprès de deux groupes d’élèves de 7-8 ans : 1) enseignement des propriétés formelles et des propriétés sémantiques des mots (n = 43) et 2) enseignement des propriétés formelles des mots (n = 44). Un troisième groupe d’élèves constituait le groupe contrôle (n = 44). Pour les deux conditions expérimentales, 24 mots ont été enseignés aux élèves. Pour évaluer les apprentissages réalisés, une dictée a été proposée aux élèves avant et après l’intervention. Les résultats montrent que l’intervention a favorisé l’apprentissage des phonèmes multigraphémiques et des lettres muettes chez les élèves ayant tiré profit des conditions expérimentales mises à l’essai, bien que des variations soient observées selon le phénomène orthographique.
... From a theoretical perspective, when students encounter an unfamiliar word during reading, they engage in phonological recoding to establish sound-spelling correspondence (Share, 1995) and infer the meaning of the words from their contexts, including the surrounding words and sentence structure (Horst, 2013;Perfetti & Stafura, 2014;Sternberg, 1987). Once an association between the sound, spelling, and meaning of the word is established, it attains lexical quality in the reader's mental lexicon (Perfetti, 2007). This process is often referred to as incidental word learning (Swanborn & de Glopper, 1999) or statistical learning (Treiman & Kessler, 2022). ...
... Indeed, most words occur multiple times in a book. Words that are unfamiliar to a child during the first few occurrences may become more familiar as they repeatedly show up across contexts (Hulme et al., 2019;Joseph & Nation, 2018), leading to higher lexical quality (Brinchmann et al., 2016;Perfetti, 2007;Richter et al., 2013). When reading through fiction, the child develops a mental model (Kintsch, 2004) of the characters, their relationships, and events in the narrative. ...
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... A más de reconocer automáticamente las palabras en la lectura, el léxico mental actúa como fuente que atribuye el contenido semántico a las palabras que constan en los textos. En quienes ya tiene experticia lectora el proceso se inicia con las representaciones ortográficas que permiten rememorar las representaciones fonológicas de cada palabra, se sabe, que el léxico otorga la significación de esta, es el paso que lector da para construir el significado mientras realiza la lectura (Perfetti, 2007). Asimismo, para Errázuriz y otros (2020), señan que la compresión lectora es procesos cognitivos de interacción entre el texto y el lector, el segundo construye significados para cumplir con el objetivo que persigue. ...
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