Phonological recoding by dysphasic children and beginning French readers.

In this paper we present data from a study on the use of phonological decoding by French beginning readers with a DLD (developmental language disorders) and control groups of unaffected children. Phonological recoding refers to the mechanism of converting written symbols into a sound-based representation. Activating phonological word forms aids in retrieving the associated meaning from the mental lexicon. This kind of process use the relationship between the oral and written languages and particularly those that used the alphabetic system which encode the oral structure of words. The phonological recoding is considered as a first step to litteracy. Four computer-driven tasks were proposed to subjects who had to judge the identity between two items presented successively (two visual items, two auditory items, one visual item and one auditory item). The dysphasic children showed a difficulty in establishing the link between two visual items. We suggest that the dysphasic children tested here have problems in ordinal information processing. Their impairment in processing spacial order information in orthographic sequences may impede the development of reading acquisition and more precisely the phonological recoding.