Contenu du sommaire : L'orthographe et ses scripteurs, sous la direction de Jean-Pierre Chevrot

A Genetic Analysis of Number in French. This paper is devoted to the cognitive operations which underlie the acquisition of number in French orthography. To better understand some of the particuliarities of this linguistic category, a genetic approach is derived from the study of the problems children are confronted with, when they try to learn it. Two main aspects are analyzed: the construction of a "plural protosign" through an interface between linguistic and extralinguistic factors, and its morphosyntactic actualisation, with graphic agreements.

According to traditional stage models of spelling development, children are thought to isolate the phonemes in the word and attempt to spell each with an appropriate grapheme without regard for acceptable letter sequences or other conventions of specific orthographies. In this paper, using nonwords in both judgment and production tasks, we show that French children (Grades 1 to 5) are sensitive to some orthographic patterns having no phonological counterparts (the use of double consonants and the transcription of /o/) much earlier than traditional stage models posit.

This article deals with the acquisition of the /E/ French verbal inflexional morphology in primary school and in second high school (from 7 to 15 year old students). The study is based upon the observation of two corpora. The first one consists in metagraphic discussions with the students (from 7 to 10). The second one consists in a test (taken by 1269 students from 10 to 15) about /E/ homophonous verbal endings. The analysis of the errors made by the students led us to bring to light three big tendencies in second high school. We try to analyse how these tendencies work in primary school from the observation of what the students say about errors.

This paper questions the main proposal of the stade models of spelling acquisition which postulate that children go through a série of stages characterised by the acquisition of specific processing abilities during learning. Two kinds of evidence against this hypothesis are presented here through the analysis of neuropsychological and experimental data. It is argued that the mechanisms underlying normal reading establish very early during development, their involvement in processing being essentially determined by word familiarity. Catherine Martinet, Marilyne Bosse, Sylviane Valdois, Marie-Jeanne Tainturier. Existe-t-il des stades dans l'acquisition de l'orthographe d'usage ? This paper questions the main proposal of the stade models of spelling acquisition which postulate that children go through a série of stages characterised by the acquisition of specific processing abilities during learning. Two kinds of evidence against this hypothesis are presented here through the analysis of neuropsychological and experimental data. It is argued that the mechanisms underlying normal reading establish very early during development, their involvement in processing being essentially determined by word familiarity.

This study analyses a corpus of 1 000 questions addressed to the ORTHOTEL service between January and August 1995. Accessible via the Minitel, this service provides assistance in helping ordinary writers resolve their spelling difficulties. The analysis yields two major results : on the one hand it shows accrued interest in grammatical markers and in particular those of the plural. It also allows for the description of highly differentiated normative attitudes linked in interpretation to real or supposed competencies. The observation of these questions which precede the act of writing suggest furthermore that the areas of spelling insecurity are not necessarily directly related to social distinction.

The aim of this study is to present organized statistical data extracted from a large corpus of 15 000 forms showing spelling errors. This corpus, ORTHOTEL, is the result of Minitel users wondering about word spelling. An automatic treatment has been applied to the corpus to separate and analyse erors. Half of the forms of the corpus are rightly spelled. It indicates the users' degree of linguistic insecurity. An automatic text-to-phone system applied on the badly spelled words shows that a great part are homophone to a correct word taken from a reference lexicon of 80 000 canonical forms. An alignment algorithm has classified the orthographic transformations which account for deviations from the reference lexicon .

The Buben effect : from the historical linguistics to the cognitive approach (and back) In the studies of historical linguistics, the authors often try to explain phonetic evolution by the influence of spelling on pronunciation (the so-called Buben effect or spelling pronounciation). At first, we analyze the results of the historical studies and we specify the modes of that influence. In a second time, we present psycholinguistic data and models that may explain the cognitive mechanisms responsible for such an influence. We conclude by showing how this detour by cognitive approach allows a best understanding of the Buben effect on the historical plan.