Summary : Brulex : A computerized lexical data base for the french language. This paper presents a lexical database developed for experimental research in psycholinguistics. The Brulex system provides orthographic, phonological, grammatical and frequency information for approximately 36 000 French words. It also contains some other useful information to help in selecting experimental materials (uniqueness point, neighborhood count, phonological structure, mean bigram frequency). Key words : experimental psycholinguistics, lexicon, word recognition.

Perceptual discrimination between speech sounds belonging to different phoneme categories is better than that between sounds falling within the same category. This property, known as "categorical perception," is weaker in children affected by dyslexia. Categorical perception develops from the predispositions of newborns for discriminating all potential phoneme categories in the world's languages. Predispositions that are not relevant for phoneme perception in the ambient language are usually deactivated during early childhood. However, the current study shows that dyslexic children maintain a higher sensitivity to phonemic distinctions irrelevant in their linguistic environment. This suggests that dyslexic children use an allophonic mode of speech perception that, although without straightforward consequences for oral communication, has obvious implications for the acquisition of alphabetic writing. Allophonic perception specifically affects the mapping between graphemes and phonemes, contrary to other manifestations of dyslexia, and may be a core deficit.

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children has been associated with attentional and executive problems, but also with socioemotional difficulties possibly associated with deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM). Socioemotional problems in ADHD are associated with more negative prognoses, notably interpersonal, educational problems, and an increased risk of developing other psychiatric disorders that emphasize the need to clarify the nature of their ToM deficits. In this study, we hypothesized that ToM dysfunction in children with ADHD is largely attributable to their attentional and/or executive deficits. Thirty-one children with ADHD (8-12 years, IQ > 85) and 31 typically developing (TD) children were assessed using executive functions (inhibition, planning, and flexibility) and attentional tasks, as well as two advanced ToM tasks (Reading the Mind in the Eyes and Faux Pas) involving different levels of executive control. Children with ADHD performed more poorly than TD children in attentional, executive function, and ToM tasks. Linear regression analyses conducted in the ADHD group indicated that inhibition scores predicted performance on the "Faux Pas" task the best, while attention scores were the best for predicting performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task. When controlled for inhibition and attentional variables, ToM performance in children with ADHD was actually similar to TD children. Contrarily, controlling for ToM scores did not normalize performance for inhibition and attentional tasks in children with ADHD. This unidirectional relationship suggests that deficits in the EF and attentional domains are responsible for ToM deficits in ADHD, which therefore may contribute to their socioemotional difficulties.

Summary. The study examines the possibility of observing on-line recognition of spoken words through manipulations of the location of the uniqueness point (UP) in a gender-classification task. The subjects were presented with spoken French nouns and had to indicate by a key-press response whether each 'was feminine or masculine. RTs measured from word onset were significantly correlated with UP location, a finding that supports the notion of online processing. The effect of UP location is, however, smaller than that predicted by the original cohort theory (that recognition occurs exactly at the UP). On the other hand, it is stronger when words with respectively early and late UPs are presented in homogeneous blocks rather than in mixed order. It is proposed that the results can be accounted for by the notion of a sub-optimal lexical strategy in which some monitoring of the phonetic data continues past the UP.A notion that has exerted a great influence on current conceptions of speech perception is that the process of word recognition begins on line during reception of the acoustic evidence (Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978;Cole & Jakimik, 1980;Frauenfelder & Tyler, 1987). As Cole and Rudnicky (1983) note, the notion was anticipated a century ago by Bagley (1900-1). Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978) gave the notion a strict application in their "cohort model" in which speech recognition was considered as a real-time process making optimal use of the information in the mental lexicon. For the case of isolated words, cohort theory assumed that full identification occurs as soon as the data processed since the beginning of the word are no longer compatible with more than one lexical candidate. The point at which the critical batch of information bringing the set of candidates (the "cohort") down to one is delivered is called the "uniqueness point" (UP). For pseudowords used in the lexical decision task, the critical statistic is the "deviation point" (DP), i.e., the point at which the data cease to be compatible with any item represented in the lexicon.The existing evidence from studies of the effects of either UP or DP location is somewhat contradictory.A strong effect of the location of the UP was reported by Marslen-Wilson (1980) in a phoneme-monitoring task using lists of disconnected spoken words. The original aim Offprint requests to: M. Radeau of the study was to find out whether the task was performed at the level of retrieved lexical representations. A regular decrease in monitoring time was observed, the further the target occurred in the word. The data were subsequently (Marslen-Wilson, 1987) reanalysed in relation to the distance between the target and the UP and a very high correlation was found. The slope, however, was not reported, making it difficult to estimate the size of the effect.Luce, Pisoni, and Manous (1984), using a "gating task" in which the subject is asked to identify a word on the basis of an early segment of varying size, obtained an effect of the location of the UP. The effect was probably s...

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. b s t r a c tPhonological development was assessed in six alphabetic orthographies (English, French, Greek, Icelandic, Portuguese and Spanish) at the beginning and end of the first year of reading instruction. The aim was to explore contrasting theoretical views regarding: the question of the availability of phonology at the outset of learning to read (Study 1); the influence of orthographic depth on the pace of phonological development during the transition to literacy (Study 2); and the impact of literacy instruction (Study 3). Results from 242 children did not reveal a consistent sequence of development as performance varied according to task demands and language. Phonics instruction appeared more influential than orthographic depth in the emergence of an early meta-phonological capacity to manipulate phonemes, and preliminary indications were that cross-linguistic variation was associated with speech rhythm more than factors such as syllable complexity. The implications of the outcome for current models of phonological development are discussed.