LEXOP: a lexical database providing orthography-phonology statistics for French monosyllabic words.

During the last 20 years, psycholinguistic research has identified many variables that influence reading and spelling processes. We describe a new computerized lexical database, LEXOP, which provides quantitative descriptors about the relations between orthography and phonology for French monosyllabic words. Three main classes of variables are considered: consistency of print-to-sound and sound-to-print associations, frequency of orthography-phonology correspondences, and word neighborhood characteristics.

Finding parts within figures: a developmental study.

Preschool children, primary school children, and unschooled adults were tested on the part-probe task designed by Palmer. Relatively high scores were obtained with all groups on parts which had a 'good' relationship with the figure. However, the ability to find more deeply embedded segments was not present in the preschool children or in the unschooled adults. This indicates that the processes of postperceptual analysis necessary to find a part in a figure are neither built-in nor the consequence of mere cognitive growth, but depend on the instruction or experience usually provided in school. Such processes should not be confused with those that lead to form perception. Inspection of the part-figure pairs and of the corresponding detection scores suggests the importance of several stimulus properties.

Speech-mediated retention in dyslexics.

Dyslexics (6 to 9 yr. old) and a control group of 12 normal readers (second-graders) were tested on a memory task with rhyming and non-rhyming items. The most important finding is that both groups were penalized by rhyme, indicating speech coding. It was observed that the dyslexics were not less penalized by rhyme than were controls. The present results are compared with those of other recent studies.