A longitudinal study of the effects of syllabic structure on the development of reading and spelling skills in French

The central hypothesis of this study was that phonological mediation plays a critical role in the early development of reading and spelling in French. Therefore, the phonological structure of items, as opposed to their visual characteristics, was expected to be a significant determinant of performance. This hypothesis was tested in a short-term longitudinal study with a group of first graders (N = 57) who were administered a reading and a spelling task involving pseudowords of different syllabic structures. The first prediction was that there would be better performance on pseudowords with a simple structure (CVCVCV) than on pseudowords with a complex structure (CCVCVC or CVCCVC), and that errors on syllables with a complex structure would involve the deletion of codas or the simplification of complex onsets. We also predicted that errors would be consistent with a sonority hierarchy; for example, we expected more deletions of liquids than obstruents in clusters.