Sonority as a Phonological Cue in Early Perception of Written Syllables in French.

Many studies focused on the letter and sound co-occurrences to account for the well-documented syllable-based effects in French in visual (pseudo)word processing. Although these language-specific statistical properties are crucial, recent data suggest that studies that go all-in on phonological and orthographic regularities may be misguided in interpreting how-and why-readers locate syllable boundaries and segment clusters. Indeed, syllable-based effects could depend on more abstract, universal phonological constraints that rule and govern how letter and sound occur and co-occur, and readers could be sensitive to sonority-a universal phonological element-for processing (pseudo)words. Here, we investigate whether French adult skilled readers rely on universal phonological sonority-related markedness continuum across the syllable boundaries for segmentation (e.g., from marked, illegal intervocalic clusters /zl/ to unmarked, legal intervocalic clusters /lz/). To address this question, we ran two tasks with 128 French adult skilled readers using two versions of the illusory conjunction paradigm (Task 1 without white noise; Task 2 with white noise). Our results show that syllable location and segmentation in reading is early and automatically modulated by phonological sonority-related markedness in the absence or quasi-absence of statistical information and does not require acoustic-phonetic information. We discuss our results toward the overlooked role of phonological universals and the over-trusted role of statistical information during reading processes.

Universal Restrictions in Reading: What Do French Beginning Readers (Mis)perceive?

Despite the many reports that consider statistical distribution to be vitally important in visual identification tasks in children, some recent studies suggest that children do not always rely on statistical properties to help them locate syllable boundaries. Indeed, sonority - a universal phonological element - might be a reliable source for syllable segmentation. More specifically, are children sensitive to a universal phonological sonority-based markedness continuum within the syllable boundaries for segmentation (e.g., from marked, illegal intervocalic clusters, "jr," to unmarked, legal intervocalic clusters, "rj"), and how does this sensitivity progress with reading acquisition? To answer these questions, we used the classical illusory conjunction (IC) paradigm. Forty-eight French typically developing children were tested in April (T1), October (T2) and April (T3; 20 children labeled as "good" readers, M chronological age at T1 = 81.5 ± 4.0; 20 children labeled as "poor" readers, M chronological age at T1 = 80.9 ± 3.4). In this short-term longitudinal study, not only we confirmed that syllable segmentation abilities develop with reading experience and level but the Condition × Sonority interaction revealed for the first time that syllable segmentation in reading may be modulated by phonological sonority-based markedness in the absence or quasi-absence of statistical information, in particular within syllable boundaries; this sensitivity is present at an early age and does not depend on reading level and sonority-unrelated features.