Contenu du sommaire : Traitement des contraintes de la production d'écrit

This article focuses on the way in which text production is conditioned, as it progresses, by the already-written text. This is a question that arises from both psychology, inasmuch as it studies the cognitive activity of writers, and linguistics, in that it studies textual features. The article thus examines first the epistemological and methodological problems that a pluridisciplinary approach to written production must take into account. Then it focuses on the temporal nature of writing (writing's temporality) and foregrounds the different temporal strata in which the production of writing is inscribed. Finally, the article explores the dependence between already-produced text and text still to come, presenting the “ eye and pen ” tool that allows observation of ocular movements and thus highlights the way in which writers refer to already-produced text, which allows identification of writers' differentiated behaviors.

When composing a text, writers have to manage several levels of constraints. One of those is to take into account the visuo-spatial dimension of text production, i.e. the physical space of the document (sheet of paper, screen), the visual representation of the written text (textual layout), and the amount of visual content to be conveyed. The aim of this article is to present a description of the visuo-spatial dimension of writing. We show that crossing the cognitive psychology approach and the genetic criticism approach enables to delineate the characteristics and the different facets of the visuo-spatial dimension of writing. Genetic criticism defines how writers take into account the different modalities of the visuo-spatial dimension of writing, while cognitive psychology describes the cognitive structures, functions and processes involved to manage that dimension. This article ends with a short presentation of a study conducted from such a dual perspective.

The aim of this paper is to present a review of psycholinguistic studies designed to examine the impact of transcription skills in written text compositions and to compare psycholinguistic and linguistic results about the issue of number agreement, with some didactical implications. In psycholinguistics, the issue of the impact of handwriting and spelling skills on the quality and management of written text production was renewed by developmental models of composing. Handwriting and spelling appeared to be as two main cognitive constraints during text production in any novice writer. A great number of research was devoted to assess the influence of handwriting and/or spelling processes both on the quality of the produced text and on the on line management of the other composition processes. However, spelling production is not only linked to the writer's working memory resources. In the field of linguistics, and with another methodological approach, research indeed shows how correct agreements in French depend on children's conceptions on morphology, syntax and morphography.

This article begins with an overview of the studies related to the coherence phenomenon, as it is constructed by the readers. It demonstrates how the studies of comprehension clarify the functioning of text production, especially when it comes to the mental representation of the text, coherence relations, linguistic markers and inference processes. Subsequently, this article focuses on the writers and investigates how they process linguistic and cognitive constraints during their text production. It relies on the writing samples produced by students who were asked to write a continuation for a text and develops the questioning around two types of constraints : those related to a text produced so far, and those associated with memory limits of the writer. Within this perspective, text production is studied by considering textual and cognitive conditions of writing both as constraints and heuristics of production. More precisely, it is investigated how a young writer articulates certain enunciative, thematic and structural constraints imposed by the priming text. Based on these empiric analyses, the last part of the article shows how memory influences the management of the writing constraints.

The purpose of this article is to focus on the acquisition of the text's textual cohesion by studying the use of punctuation marks and connectives in narratives written by children at the beginning of sixth grade. It yields a dialogue between the three interdisciplinary fields of linguistics, psychology and didactics. The functions of punctuation marks and connectives are first specified, at the both linguistic and psychological levels ; then we will present a study of students entering the 6th grade level. On the basis of cohesion analysis, we show that the students' abilities in writing are much diversified. This diversification attests cognitive difficulties in writing acquisition still remaining at the beginning of grade six, that should be taken into account by teachers in planning their curriculum.