Applied Psycholinguistics to Early Literacy Development. Leonor Scliar-Cabral 

Abstract

The paper discusses how we apply psycholinguistics to early literacy development. Written systems were invented quite recently, culminating with the proto-alphabetic one, a phonographic writing. They are not spontaneously and compulsorily acquired, but they occur in a systematic context of learning. Neurons of reading are not programmed genetically for recognizing the written word and the perception of the direction and position of letter features goes against the visual neurons’ natural disposition to find symmetry in the visual cues: neurons of reading must be recycled. I describe invariant letter features in printed fonts and give examples of sociolinguistic variation, conditioned by co-articulation. I then present the role primary and secondary areas perform while processing the acoustic and visual language cues. In the case of the luminous signal, the primary regions process the gross signals, independently of hemispheric specialization, while the output of this first processing goes compulsorily to the specialized region for reading, the occipitotemporal ventral region of the left hemisphere, if the subject had learnt the written code. The proposal Scliar’s Early Literacy Development System to prevent functional illiteracy addresses two main challenging problems of early literacy development, namely, segmenting words and syllables (phonemic awareness) and recognizing letter features.

Apprentissage de la graphomotricité à l’école: Quelles acquisitions? Quelles pratiques? Quels outils?Marie-France Morin, Florence Bara et Denis Alamargot

Abstract

The aim of this article is to review the main studies dealing with pupils handwriting learning in elementary school. Firstly, this synthesis will address the cognitive, perceptual and motor aspects of the acquisition of handwriting, focusing on the different allographs that the young reader-writer must learn to manage. Secondly, the question of the learning and teaching of handwriting in school will be discussed, in particular from the point of view of the different writing styles taught in elementary school and the diversity of school contexts. Finally, learning to write will be considered in the context of the digital age, where the use of digital tools is becoming increasingly popular in the schools.

Abstract

Research has shown that the entry into writing in children is characterised by steps revealing the acquisition of different dimensions of writing. As part of the framework of our master research, our objective was to observe and describe how, to what extent, in allophone children, these steps could be influenced by the characteristics of their L1. The analysis of the written productions requested by two invented spelling tasks allowed us to categorise our subjects depending on the processing they did with the writing and to compare the skills developed by our French-speaking and allophone subjects, and this twice. Our results reflect a similar acquisition of writing between francophone and allophone children. Indeed, all our subjects of the same type of writers have obtained similar results. Moreover, the development of literacy in our allophone subjects seems to be carried out according to a model of mixed development of writing, as described by Morin (2002).