The development of orthographic processing skills in children in early French immersion programs

Abstract

Children learning to read in two languages are faced with orthographic features from both languages, either unique to a language or similar across languages. In the present study, we examined how children develop orthographic processing skills over time (from grade 1 to grade 2) with a sample of Canadian children attending a French immersion program and we investigated the underlying factor structure of orthographic skills across English and French. Two orthographic processing tasks were administered in both languages: lexical orthographic processing (e.g. choose the correct spelling frompeople–peeple) and sub-lexical orthographic processing (e.g. which is the more word-likevaid–vayd?), which included both language-specific and language-shared orthographic regularities. Children’s performances in sub-lexical tasks increased with grade but were comparable across languages. Further, evidence for a one factor model including all measures suggested that there is a common underlying orthographic processing skill that cuts across measurement and language variables. Keywords: orthographic processing; reading; French immersion; bilinguals; second language learners

The development of a measure of orthographic knowledge in the Arabic language: A psychometric evaluation

“…Although further work is needed to examine the dimensionality of Arabic orthographic knowledge, and orthographic processing generally, on a broader scale, these preliminary results suggest that lexical orthographic knowledge may be a unitary ability indicated by individuals' ability to distinguish correct versus incorrect spelling in Arabic. The unidimensionality of our findings is in accordance with findings by Commissaire et al (2014), who found a one factor model of orthographic knowledge to capture both lexical and sublexical tasks in both French and English, suggesting a common orthographic knowledge skill across languages and variables.…”

“…This may be done by designing a wordlike task based on the orthographic and morphological patterns represented in this measure. Embedding these patterns in pseudowords would assist researchers in exploring the feasibility of assessing orthographic knowledge at the sublexical level in Arabic, similar to the studies by Cassar and Treiman (1997), Pacton et al (2001), Commissaire et al (2014), and Deacon et al (2013). This could be particularly informative for assessing children's tacit orthographic knowledge prior to formal reading instruction.…”

Phonemic Awareness and Reading Comprehension among Japanese Adult Learners of English

“…This cross-linguistic difference in cognitive processes during reading has critical implications for readers' acquisition of reading skills in L2, because they transfer the cognitive strategies already established in their L1 to L2 reading (Commissaire, Pasquarella, Chen & Deacon, 2014;Koda, 2005Koda, , 2007. An extensive body of L2 word recognition studies has documented the lasting influence of L1 word recognition processes even among advanced-level L2 readers.…”

Lesen in der Fremdsprache Französisch. Kompetenzen von Drittklässlerinnen und Drittklässlern mit unterschiedlichen Schrift- und Sprachfähigkeiten in der Erstsprache Deutsch

“…B. alphabetisch oder logographisch). Andererseits gibt es auch Universalien, die für alle Schriftsprachen Gültigkeit haben (Perfetti & Verhoeven, 2017a (Chung et al, 2017;Chung et al, 2018;Commissaire et al, 2014;Kahn-Horwitz et al, 2014;Kim & Piper, 2019;Kuo et al, 2016;Shakkour, 2014;Wawire & Kim, 2018). Dabei zeigen sich besonders auf der Ebe-ne der hierarchiehöheren Leseprozesse Transferleistungen, wenig erstaunlich, handelt es sich dabei doch um konzeptuelles Wissen wie die Hinzuziehung von Vorwissen, die Inferenzziehung oder die Aktivierung von Textformatwissen (vgl.…”