Confronting Lexical Choice and Error Distribution in Written French: New Insights into the Linguistic Insecurity of Students with Dyslexia

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to analyze written texts produced by monolingual French university students, with and without dyslexia. More specifically, we were interested in the linguistic characteristics of the words used during a written production and of the type of word errors. Previous studies showed that students with dyslexia have difficulties in written production, whether in terms of the number of spelling errors, some syntactic aspects, identification of errors, confusion of monosyllabic words, omissions of words in sentences, or utilization of unexpected or inappropriate vocabulary. For this present study, students with dyslexia and control students were asked to produce written and spoken narrative and expository texts. The written texts (N = 86) were collected using Eye and Pen© software with digitizing tablets. Results reveal that students with dyslexia do not censor themselves as regards the choice of words in their written productions. They use the same types of words as the control students. Nevertheless, they make many more errors than the control students on all types of words, regardless of their linguistic characteristics (length, frequency, grammatical classes, etc.). Finally, these quantitative analyses help to target a rather unexpected subset of errors: short words, and in particular determiners and prepositions.

French Students with Dyslexia Facing the Punctuation System: Insecurity, Inventory Use, and Error Studies

“…Nevertheless, some previous studies reveal the important function of punctuation in the organization and structuration of a written text (among others, [ 28 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ]). Moreover, in a previous study concerning the lexical choices of students with dyslexia [ 14 ], our analyses revealed that one of the general indicators was the number of punctuation marks. This indicated that there is a significant difference in the proportion of punctuation marks: students with dyslexia use less punctuation than control students.…”

“…Various questions concerning different topics were asked about student life, learning, reading, writing, or diagnosis. One of the questions was, “Are you declared to the disability services of your institution?” For both questionnaires, approximately the same result was obtained: almost half of the students with dyslexia were not declared to the institution’s disability service at their university [ 14 ]. That means that, potentially, one out of every two students with dyslexia is not declared to their institution’s disability service.…”

“…These feelings are confirmed by the experimental analyses that follow these questionnaires. For instance, they make more errors of spelling and verb agreement than control students (for instance, [ 14 , 15 ]). Moreover, these findings are consistent with previous international studies.…”

Caracterización del proceso de escritura de niños y preadolescentes de DT y TDL: Aplicación de la técnica Eye and Pen

“…Esta ha demostrado ser muy efectiva para dar cuenta de los procesos de traducción y transcripción propuestos por el modelo de Hayes (Hayes, 2012;Hayes & Berninger, 2014) y además ha permitido observar cómo se van transformando dichos procesos a medida que aumenta el dominio de la escritura. Así se han comparado, usando el Eye and Pen, el desempeño de los escritores expertos y novatos (Alamargot, Plane, Lambert & Chesnet, 2010) y, además, la técnica se ha aplicado a poblaciones de niños en edad escolar, ya sea de desarrollo típico o con problemas lingüísticos y/o cognitivos (Alamargot, Morin & Simard-Dupuis, 2018;Mazur-Palandre, Quignard & Witko, 2021).…”

“…Sin embargo, la idea es que no todos los escolares afrontan el dominio de la escritura en las mismas condiciones. Es posible identificar grupos para los cuales este proceso de adquisición podría conllevar un desafío más determinante por poseer problemas como la dislexia (Alamargot, Morin & Simard-Dupuis, 2020;Sumner & Connelly, 2020;Mazur-Palandre et al, 2021). Otro trastorno relacionado con las dificultades en el dominio escritural corresponde a los niños con Trastorno del Desarrollo del Lenguaje (TDL), que tienen dificultades para adquirir la lengua oral de su cultura (Graham, Hebert, Fishman, Ray & Rouse, 2020).…”