Are French dyslexic children sensitive to consonant sonority in segmentation strategies? Preliminary evidence from a letter detection task.
French dyslexic kids still use sonority-based syllable cues in reading-like tasks, so target processing speed not phoneme retraining.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Maïonchi-Pino et al. (2012) asked French dyslexic kids to spot target letters inside made-up words. The words were built so some syllables started with loud consonants and others with soft ones.
The team wanted to know if dyslexic readers still break words apart using the natural loud-to-soft sound pattern called sonority.
What they found
Both dyslexic and typical readers found letters faster when the syllable followed the loud-to-soft rule. The dyslexic group was slower overall, but they still used the same sound cue.
This means the basic phonological tool is there; it just runs on a delay.
How this fits with other research
Cashon et al. (2013) saw the opposite pattern in deaf Dutch children. Deaf readers struggled with complex words even in sixth grade, while Norbert’s dyslexic readers kept the segmentation cue. The gap comes from sensory route: deaf learners lack full sound input, dyslexic learners have the sounds but process them slowly.
Noordenbos et al. (2012) tracked younger at-risk kindergarteners who heard speech in an allophonic mode. By first grade, good reading instruction pushed most kids into normal phonemic mode. Together, these studies map a timeline: early risk shows up as odd sound categories, later risk shows up as slow use of normal categories.
Leung et al. (2018) tried ten weeks of visual-perceptual drills with dyslexic 7- to 8-year-olds. Visual scores rose a little, but brain responses stayed flat. Norbert’s finding suggests you might get more payoff by speeding up phonological games that already exist, not by adding new visual tasks.
Why it matters
If the child can hear and can segment by sonority, don’t waste hours re-teaching phonemes. Instead, use rapid naming games, syllable-timed reading races, and choral repeated reading to cut processing time. Check speed first, accuracy second; once speed rises, comprehension often follows.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
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 to an optimal 'sonorant coda-obstruent onset' sonority profile as a cue for a syllable-based segmentation. To examine these questions, we used a modified version of the illusory conjunction paradigm with French dyslexic children compared with both chronological age-matched and reading level-matched controls. Our results first showed that the syllable-based segmentation is developmentally constrained in visual identification: in normally reading children, it appears to progressively increase as reading skills increase. However, surprisingly, our results also showed that dyslexic children were able to use syllable-sized units. Then, data highlighted that a syllable-based segmentation in visual identification basically relies on an optimal 'sonorant coda-obstruent onset' sonority profile rather than on phonological and orthographic statistical properties in normally reading children as well as, surprisingly, in dyslexic children. Our results are discussed to support a sonority-modulated prelexical role of syllable-sized units in visual identification in French, even in dyslexic children who exhibited a developmentally delayed profile. We argue that dyslexic children have deficits in online phonetic-phonological processing rather than degraded or underspecified phonetic-phonological representations.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2012 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.07.045