The authors assume that during the visual perception of labelable objects there occurs an implicit labelling which gives rise to a readiness for pronunciation, and that the two phenomena are involved in stimulus processing. In order to test these assumptions, the duration of eye fixation on drawing representing familiar objects was measured. The data show that on an average this duration was longer when the name for the object required four or five syllables to pronounce than when it required only one syllable. This syllable effect was observed in various experimental conditions where possible effects of other variables could be controlled. The effect obtained irrespective of whether or not the subjects were allowed to see the drawings before the experiment, and of whether or not they were allowed to go through the list of names for the objects.

As Chomsky pointed out (1961), generalized transformations are the support of the recursivity of grammar. Among these, embedding trausformations by relativization are of special interest to the psycholinguist in that they illustrate a possible discrepancy between the acceptability and the well-formedness of sentences. Thus, they may shed light on the distinction between competence and performance, Consider the following sentences (1) and (2), borrowed from Miller (1962). These two sentences are equally grammatical but (1) is harder to process and memorize than (2): (1) The race that the car that thepeople whom the obviously not very well dressed man called sold won was held last Stimmer.(2) The obviously not very well dressed man called the people who sold the car that won the race that was held last summer.The purpose of the present study is to compare the performances of French speaking children and adults who are required to produce sentences involving a relative transformation. It is assumed that the diflference in performance between öiir children and adults, especially differences in difficulty based on the nature of the material and differences in types of error, will permit us to give a relatively clear description of the mechanisms involved in such performance, and the corresponding heuristics.

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L'auteur se propose de contribuer à élaborer des outils d'évaluation du comportement de lecture qui sont d'usage courant en psychologie expérimentale, notamment dans le domaine de la psychologie de la perception, de la psychologie linguistique et de la psychologie cognitive.