Le rôle des facteurs phonologiques dans le développement des connaissances orthographiques chez l’élève dysphasique francophone du primaire

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a condition that affects the standard acquisition of oral language. Several spheres of language can be affected to different degrees. Phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmatic difficulties can be observed in the sample of children affected by DLD, on both expressive and receptive aspects. Such difficulties manifest themselves in early childhood and most of them stay consistent, despite rehabilitative measures being taken. Difficulties in acquiring writing abilities are also identified in those learners’ process. These challenges are not surprising considering that French written code requires a strong knowledge of spoken language and a large body of empirical data suggests that students affected by DLD approach the learning process with poor oral capacities. Although a large part of this data comes from works published in English, some consensuses diverge and suggest the presence of challenges in reading skills, more specifically in word identification, but also in reading comprehension. Writing challenges, although less documented, are also observed, notably in planning skills, expressing ideas, but also in the revision and correction steps of a written piece. Orthographic production abilities could also be inferior to standardized norms. If identification and isolated word production challenges would be explained by an inability to store and reuse orthographic representations in the orthographic lexicon, few studies were oriented on the French dysphasic student’s construction of this lexicon. Studies conducted on English samples must be carefully interpreted, as French and English have very different orthographic codes with each their particularities.  The main goal of this exploratory study is to describe the orthographic competences of dysphasic students and comprehend what factors are influencing their language development. It is currently considered that phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and short-term verbal memory abilities could very well predict the learning process of reading and writing. Other factors are recognized to predict success in reading and writing, notably visuoattentional skills, graphophonological processes or also automatization capacities. Relying on a large body of data suggesting the existence of phonological difficulties experienced by dysphasic students, this study will try to verify if those deficits explain the poor orthographical knowledge of those learners.  The main goal of this study is to describe the orthographical knowledge of French elementary school students affected by DLD. Three goals are derivatives of the main one: 1) Describing the orthographical knowledge of the dysphasic student; 2) Identify if the written word production results are related to other tests using orthographical knowledge such as word/pseudo-word recognition and reading comprehension and 3) Identify if phonological factors such as short term verbal memory, phonological awareness, graphophonological processes as well as rapid automatized naming are related to the dysphasic student’s orthographical representation. A group comparative methodological approach was used in this study in order to analyze the results of three groups of participants of the study sample : 1) an experimental group including students with severe DLD (DYS, N = 25), 2) a controlled group matched according to reading skill level (CL, N = 26) and a controlled group matched according to chronological age (CA, N = 42). This exploratory study’s results suggest that the dysphasic students’ performances in orthographical production are similar to those of the younger students of group CL. Furthermore, students affected by DLD seem to score inferior results in tests evaluating phonological abilities, notably short term verbal memory, phonological conscience, rapid automatized naming and graphophonological processes, again demonstrating results similar to those of students of group CL. Conclusively, heterogenic and discordant links between the French dysphasic elementary school learners’ scores in phonological tests and orthographical knowledge tests show that phonological knowledge is not entirely the cause of delays in the development of their orthographical skills.

Keyphrases: Developmental Language Disorder, dysphasia, orthographic knowledge, graphophonological processes, phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, rapid automatized naming, elementary school students