This article presents MANULEX, 1 the f irst French linguistic tool that provides grade-based frequency lists of the 1.9 million words found in first-grade, secondgrade, and third-to fifth-grade French elementary school readers. The database contains 48,886 nonlemmatized entries and 23,812 lemmatized entries. It was compiled to supply the French counterpart to such works on the English language as Carroll, Davis, and Richman's (1971) American Heritage Word Frequency Book andZeno, Ivenz, Millard, andDuvvuri's (1995) Corpus-based word frequency counts are established as robust predictors of word recognition performance. Consequently, they are widely used in psycholinguistic research. Burgess and Livesay (1998) found them in almost 20% of the papers published in the main experimental psychology reviews. The word frequency effect, first noted by Cattell (1886), is one of the earliest empirical observations in cognitive psychology. Cattell demonstrated that the frequency of occurrence of a word in a language affects even the most basic processing of that word (its speed of recognition). Since this pioneering work, word frequency has been a persisting subject of study for investigators concerned with word recognition: High-frequency words are recognized more quickly and with greater accuracy than are low-frequency words, whatever the measure and task considered (for a review on word frequency effects, see Monsell, 1991). In fact, all current models of word recognition must incorporate word frequency in their activation mechanisms (for a review, see Jacobs & Grainger, 1994). Since the 1980s, for example, word frequency counts have been used mostly in connectionist modeling to simulate language development (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996;Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989). As has been described by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002), in these models, knowledge is encoded as weights on connections between units, which reflect the cumulative effects of exposure to all the words. Learning the meaning of a word is thought to be dependent on exposure to that word in its linguistic contexts, and corpus-based word frequency counts are interpreted as a reflection of such individual experiences with a word.Thus, a crucial variable for understanding language development and, particularly, the reading process is the Support for this research was provided by two national grants, Cognitive Sciences and Schools and Cognitive Sciences (2001, AL16b), and by subsidies from the National Institute of Pedagogical Research (INRP, 1997(INRP, , 1998(INRP, , 1999 This article presents MANULEX, a Web-accessible database that provides grade-level word frequency lists of nonlemmatized and lemmatized words (48,886 and 23,812 entries, respectively) computed from the 1.9 million words taken from 54 French elementary school readers. Word frequencies are provided for four levels: first grade (G1), second grade (G2), third to fifth grades (G3-5), and all grades (G1-5). The frequencies were computed following the methods described by Carroll,...

This study examines morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia. While the poor phonological awareness of dyslexic children has been related to their difficulty in handling the alphabetical principle, less is known about their morphological awareness, which also plays an important part in reading development. The aim of this study was to analyze in more detail the implications of the phonological impairments of dyslexics in dealing with larger units of language such as morphemes. First, the performance of dyslexic children in a series of morphological tasks was compared with the performance of children matched on reading-level and chronological age. In all the tasks, the dyslexic group performed below the chronological age control group, suggesting that morphological awareness cannot be developed entirely independently of reading experience and/or phonological skills. Comparisons with the reading-age control group indicated that, while the dyslexic children were poorer in the morphemic segmentation tasks, they performed normally for their reading level in the sentence completion tasks. Furthermore, they produced more derived words in the production task. This suggests that phonological impairments prevent the explicit segmentation of affixes while allowing the development of productive morphological knowledge. A second study compared dyslexic subgroups defined by their degree of phonological impairment. Our results suggest that dyslexics develop a certain type of morphological knowledge which they use as a compensatory reading strategy.

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Phonological dyslexics (Ph-DYS) are characterized by a phonological deficit, and surface dyslexics (S-DYS), by an orthographic deficit. Four issues were addressed in this study. First, we determined the proportions of Ph-DYS and S-DYS in a population of French dyslexics by applying the Castles and Coltheart's regression method (1993) to two previously unused diagnostic measures, pseudoword and irregular-word processing time. Thirty-one dyslexics were matched to 19 same-age average readers (10-years-old, CA controls) and to 19 younger children of the same reading level (8-years-old, RL controls). Compared to CA controls, there were more Ph-DYS than S-DYS. Compared to RL controls, there was still a high number of Ph-DYS, whereas the S-DYS profile almost disappeared. Next, we examined the reliability of these subtypes across different measures of phonological and orthographic skills. Compared to RL controls, both groups of dyslexics were found to be impaired only in phonological skills, either in processing time (Ph-DYS) or in accuracy (S-DYS). Then we assessed the moment at which the two dissociated profiles emerged in the course of cognitive development. In order to do so, we examined earlier longitudinal data, collected when the children were 7-and 8-years-old and found that only the S-DYS' orthographic deficit increased with development. Last, we looked at whether the Ph-DYS and S-DYS profiles were associated with other specific cognitive deficits. Specific deficits in phonemic awareness and in phonological short-term memory were found for both Ph-DYS and S-DYS. These data suggested that developmental dyslexia can be largely accounted for by an underlying phonological impairment. FOOTNOTES 1. The 17 lost participants did not differ as to their kindergarten reading level, verbal and nonverbal IQs from the 43 children remaining in the sample.