Literacy Acquisition: A Plus Factor in French Children's Word Segmentation After 5 Years of Age

Résumé En

Liaison (les[z]ours [le.zuʁs], ʽthe bears') and enchaînement (une[n]autruche [y.no.tʁy], ʽan ostrich') are two French phenomena of re-syllabification which entail children's errors in segmentation. Even though re-syllabified words are perceived blended, in writing they appear separated by graphic markers (ʽles ours', 'une autruche'). The current study aims to understand the frequency effect and the influence of literacy acquisition in word segmentation by a picture naming task and a writing task testing the same group of 37 children (in a primary school in France from 6:4 to 7:6) at three time periods (pre-readers, beginning readers and readers). Results revealed no frequency effects but a clear contribution of basic skills necessary to writing and reading activities in word segmentation. Introduction In this article, we establish a link between literacy and French children's word segmentation. We refer to literacy as a set of skills necessary to basic writing and reading activities which are developed in school (e.g. to know how to associate a phoneme to grapheme and recognized written lexical boundaries). These skills are also known as Word Study (Pinnell & Fountas, 2004). Before analyzing the role of literacy, we will describe word segmentation in French-speaking children. Then, we will focus on liaison and enchainment phonological phenomena, analyzing their implications in children's identification of word boundaries.