Development of the Abilities to Acquire New Orthographic Representations from Grades 2 to 6

Unlike English, little attention has been accorded to orthographic learning in French which has a challenging spelling due to its high level of inconsistency. There is evidence that the mastery of alphabetic decoding is critical to acquire word-specific orthographic representations (Share 1995). It is also generally admitted that orthographic processing skills are involved in orthographic learning beyond the core phonological component. Even if these skills still remain underspecified, research particularly focuses on the sensitivity to orthographic constraints. While Pacton et al. (2013) have shown that graphotactic knowledge influences the learning of new spellings, little is known about the development of this knowledge over time.

Our aim was to determine the developmental trajectory of orthographic word form acquisition abilities within the French orthography by assessing the speed of acquisition of new orthographic forms as well as the sensitivity to orthographic regularities.

Five groups of forty French-speaking children from grades 2 to 6 took part in the study. We proposed two experimental tasks. The first consisted of an orthographic learning of 10 new orthographic forms (inconsistent in spelling) by using a repeated spelling paradigm. In practice, children were firstly asked to read aloud each item once. Then, the experimenter dictated each item ten times in a mixed order. The capacity of retention of the new representations was assessed one week later with a dictation task. The second task aimed at determining the sensitivity to different French orthographic regularities by means of an orthographic choice task containing 62 pairs of non-words homophones. Moreover, general reading and spelling abilities were also assessed.

Results show that the speed of orthographic learning and the capacity of long-term retention significantly increase during the first years but do not differ anymore between grades 4-5 and 5-6, suggesting that older children have reached a nearly maximal potential in their learning capacities. Nevertheless, the general orthographic abilities, which are more dependent on scholar knowledge, continue to develop significantly during school years. Furthermore, sensitivity to orthographic regularities increases significantly only from grade 2 to 3, indicating that children as soon as 9 years-old are already able to extract different graphotactic patterns of their writing system.

Pacton, S., Sobaco, A., Fayol, M., & Treiman, R. (2013). How does graphotactic knowledge influence children’s learning of new spellings? Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 1-10.
Share, D. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition 55, 151-218.