Eme, Lambert & Alamargot, 2014

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Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9817.2011.01508.xVolume 37, Issue 3, 2014, pp 268296

Word reading and word spelling in French adult literacy students: the relationship with oral language skills

Elsa Eme, Eric Lambert and Denis AlamargotCentre de Recherches sur la Cognition et lApprentissage, Poitiers, France

We analysed word reading and spelling in French adults with low levels of literacy (A-IL). As well as examining phonological and lexical processes, we explored the relationship between literacy and oral language skills. Fifty-two adult literacy students were compared with reading level-matched pupils in Years 13 of primary school on reading tasks (pseudoword reading, word reading, text comprehension), spelling tasks (pseudoword spelling, text dictation) and oral language tasks. A-IL scored the same as children on word reading and spelling but less well on pseudoword reading and spelling. They also produced fewer phonologically acceptable errors in the dictation. Regarding oral language skills, as a group A-IL encountered greater diffi culty in pho-nology than in morphosyntax and semantics, and correlations revealed strong relation-ships between literacy levels and oral skills, particularly in the domain of phonology. Within their group, however, A-IL displayed several distinct language profi les. These could refl ect different risk factors leading to functional illiteracy and are discussed regarding the cognitive and environmental causes of impaired reading acquisition.

Functional illiteracy refers to the absence of written language skills in adolescents and adults despite the fact that they have attended school. It also describes individuals who can only use written language to a limited extent. For example, they may be able to fi ll in their personal details on a form and consult the TV listings, but are incapable of writing out a cheque or reading a patient information leafl et (Baydar, Brooks-Gunn & Furstenberg, 1993). Functional illiteracy therefore corresponds to a failure in the functional acquisition of written language. In Europe, the proportion of adults who are referred to as displaying functional illiteracy because they are incapable of performing basic reading tasks varies between 8% (Sweden) and 40% (Portugal), depending on the country and the nature of the surveys (OECD & Statistics Canada, 2000).

Illiteracy has often been described as a sociocultural handicap. Numerous national cam-paigns have been launched and extensive resources devoted to raising literacy levels, but investigations have tended to focus on the numbers of people reached by these campaigns and on the links between illiteracy and the environment. As a result, we now know that illiteracy is often associated with specifi c sociofamilial factors, such as membership of an ethnic minority, poverty and affective deprivation, or with inadequate instruction in learn-ing to read (Esprandieu & Vogler, 2000; Gottesman, Bennett, Nathan & Kelly, 1996).

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Many adults who are illiterate have had disrupted schooling (repeated years, inappropri-ate courses, truancy), or experienced family problems (abuse, invalid parents, numerous siblings). However, not all cases of illiteracy arise from these specifi c contexts, and these variables are not enough to set children on the path to illiteracy. One of the limitations of early studies is that they did not probe the participants cognitive skills. Very few research-ers in the past sought to describe the cognitive skills and learning processes of this popula-tion of adults who, despite having been taught how to read, had never actually managed to learn how to read. However, over the last few years, it has been suggested that this failure may stem from impairment of the skills or processes subtending the acquisition of written language (Eme, 2006, 2010; Greenberg, Ehri & Perin, 1997, 2002).

The present study therefore examined the reading and spelling abilities of adults who were functionally illiterate (A-IL) in relation to their oral language skills and in comparison with children who were matched for reading levels. The main purpose of the study was to analyse a series of subcomponents of reading and spelling processes in A-IL, and to explore the relationships between reading and spelling performances and their oral language skills. In the light of fi ndings of research on children with impaired reading skills, we expected the diffi culties displayed by A-IL with written language to be associated with a defi cit in the oral language skills that subtend written language acquisition, namely in phonology, syntax and semantics (Catts, Adlof & Weismer, 2006; Nation, Clarke, Marshall & Durand, 2004; Vellutino, Fletcher, Snowling & Scanlon, 2004). In order to test this hypothesis, A-IL performances were measured on a range of reading, spelling and oral language tasks, and compared with those of normal-reading children matched for reading level. In theoretical terms, we believed that comparing adult low-level readers with normal readers reading at the same grade level (i.e., assumed to have the same experience of reading; Stanovich & Cunningham, 1993) would allow us to determine whether A-IL use the same processes, relying on the same determinants, and therefore display delayed learning, or whether they have a specifi c defi cit which hinders learning. These two hypotheses (developmental delay hypothesis vs defi cit hypothesis) have been pitted against each other in a great many studies comparing either children with learning diffi culties (see Goswami & Bryant, 1989, for a review) or adults who are illiterate (Greenberg et al., 1997, 2002) with typically develop-ing children. According to the fi rst hypothesis, reading level-matched adults and children would display the same performances, indicating that the adults had followed a typical tra-jectory but at a far slower pace (e.g., due to an interruption in their schooling). According to the second hypothesis, the adults would perform less well than the children on certain tasks, refl ecting a defi cit in particular processes that might account for their diffi culty in learning to read.

In practical terms, this type of psycholinguistic approach to the language skills of people who are illiterate has considerable social implications, as it potentially allows for adult lit-eracy provision and training content to be more accurately tailored to the students particu-lar mode of functioning. In other words, when it comes to reading and writing, it can tell us exactly what can or should be taught to adults who are illiterate and how (Gottesman et al., 1996; Kruidenier, 2002).

Reading and writing diffi culties linked to illiteracy

A number of recent studies in cognitive and developmental psychology have investigated the word-reading skills and underlying word-reading defi cits of adults enrolled in literacy

FUNCTIONAL ILLITERACY AND PROCESSING OF WRITTEN WORDS 269

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programmes. Drawing on developmental models and methods that describe childrens reading acquisition (Ehri, 1987; Frith, 1985; Stanovich, Siegel & Gottardo, 1997), these studies have shown that A-IL differ from children in the way they process written words. According to developmental models, the mastery of reading and spelling skills involves the acquisition of two modes of processing. Phonological processing consists in establishing correspondences between phonemes (sounds) and graphemes (letters) for spelling, and between graphemes and phonemes for reading. Its acquisition signals the onset of the al-phabetic stage of development. Orthographic or lexical processing consists of whole-word recognition for reading and whole-word retrieval for spelling, on the basis of lexical repre-sentations contained in the mental lexicon. Its acquisition corresponds to the orthographic stage of development, which occurs when reading and spelling are, to some extent, inde-pendent of sound. Some studies have highlighted the links between reading and writing during this acquisition process, with early pseudoword-reading performances accounting for a signifi cant proportion of the variance in subsequent orthographic skills in spelling (Sprenger-Charolles, Siegel, Bchennec & Serniclaes, 2003). Share (1995) explained this fi nding by putting forward the self-teaching hypothesis, postulating that the correct de-coding of new words during reading is the best way of acquiring orthographic knowledge.

In reading, Greenberg et al. (1997) found that adult literacy students scored lower on pseudoword decoding and higher on irregular word reading than thirdfi fth graders matched for reading age. In other words, adults who are illiterate experience far greater diffi culty using the phonological processing needed for reading pseudowords or new words (e.g., bufty) than reading level-matched children, but are better at memorising the lexical representations of words, which make it possible to read irregular words that do not respect graphemephoneme correspondences (GPC, e.g., island).

Similarly in spelling, Greenberg et al. (2002) confi rmed that, compared with children with the same reading level, A-IL rely more on their lexical knowledge than on phonologi-cal recoding for spelling words. An analysis of errors on a task involving the spelling of 20 words of increasing diffi culty (e.g., bed, popping, fortunate) revealed that adults made more errors and these errors were distributed differently. Whereas the children produced more so-called phonetic or semiphonetic errors (when wen; bump bup), refl ecting recourse to phonological processing, the adults produced more nonphonetic errors, wrote one word instead of another (squirrel chegh; fortunate force), or simply gave no re-sponse at all, refl ecting more or less effi cient recourse to lexical processing. These results were in line with those of Worthy and Viise (1996), who found that adults with low levels of literacy performed similarly to children with the same reading level, but only when transcribing words that obeyed simple phonemegrapheme correspondence (PGC) rules. The adults produced more morphological errors than the children (usefy for useful, fun for funny) and more visual errors (writing one word instead of another, e.g., success for such, or producing orthographically legal sequences, e.g., brang for brave), but fewer lexical errors (long vowels, consonant doubling).

At the text level, the reliance of A-IL on lexical information in reading is refl ected in their sensitivity to context. Binder, Chace and Manning (2007) observed that adult literacy students were better at identifying words when they were inserted into a congruent con-text (The cat chased the mouse) than when they were presented in a neutral one (The guy chased the mouse). These adult students were also faster at identifying inference-related words, whose meaning was related to the context of the paragraph (e.g., sell in a story about the need for money), than control words. Furthermore, there was evidence that the students reading comprehension scores overpredicted their word-reading skills, suggesting

EME, LAMBERT and ALAMARGOT270

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that they were able to use context to effectively mask their defi cits in word decoding and improve text comprehension (Binder & Borecki, 2008; Read & Ruyter, 1985). Binder et al. (2007) concluded that, despite being poor decoders, A-IL may be good comprehend-ing readers with good language comprehension skills, including reliance on context and inference making. However, their experimental protocol concentrated on reading strate-gies, neglecting the assessment of other language abilities.

Overall, fi ndings indicate that A-IL display distinct patterns of word processing com-pared with typically developing children. They exhibit strength in lexical processing for word reading and word spelling, but severe weakness in phonological processing, suggest-ing a specifi c defi cit in phonological skills. When reading text, they show an increased reli-ance on context in word identifi cation, which suggests that they may use contextual cues to improve comprehension more effectively than children at similar reading levels.

Illiteracy and oral language skills

Some studies in the fi eld of cognitive and developmental psychology have also investigated the specifi city of the oral language skills displayed by A-IL. Three domains of oral lan-guage have been considered, namely phonology, morphosyntax and semantics.

At the phonological level, A-IL seem to present a specifi c defi cit in phonological aware-ness. Adult literacy students tend to score far lower than children matched for reading level on segmenting words into phonemes (Greenberg et al., 1997; Thompkins & Binder, 2003). Conversely, they do not differ from profi cient young readers on manipulating nonspeech units (e.g., sequences of tones; Pratt & Brady, 1988). In addition, regression analyses have revealed that phonological awareness accounts for a unique portion of the variance in A-IL reading skills (Thompkins & Binder, 2003). Thus, problems with the explicit manipulation of the phonological units of speech may account for the diffi culty encountered by A-IL in the phonological processing of written words. More specifi cally, A-IL may have an impairment in associating phonemes with graphemes when reading words due to diffi culty segmenting and blending sounds in oral words. Accordingly, functional illiteracy has sometimes been described as a special case of developmental phonological dyslexia that has gone untreated in childhood (Delahaie et al., 2000; Greenberg et al., 1997). Developmental phonological dyslexia is characterised by poor performances on phonological tasks (pseudoword reading, phoneme awareness and verbal short-term memory) with preserved abilities in orthographic tasks (regular and irregular word reading, wordlikeness choice) and is therefore interpreted as resulting from a phonological disorder compensated for by orthographic skills (Siegel, Share & Geva, 1995; Snowling & Hulme, 1989; Temple & Marshall, 1983). Research has highlighted the persistence of phonological diffi culties in well-compensated adult dyslexics (Bruck, 1990), attesting to the fact that a phonological defi cit is the core problem in devel-opmental dyslexia and may well be at the origin of this learning disorder. A recent meta-analysis supports the notion that phonological defi cits in adults with reading disabilities are persistent across age (Swanson & Ching-Ju-Hsieh, 2009). In a French study of unqualifi ed jobseekers who experienced reading diffi culties (Delahaie et al., 2000), an assessment of word identifi cation and phonological awareness suggested that 50% of the sample exhibited the characteristics of phonological dyslexia. However, other abilities were not investigated to confi rm the specifi city of the phonological impairment.

At the morphosyntactic level, A-IL appear to be severely impaired. For example, when in-terpreting unusual or complex syntactic structures, such as passives and embedded clauses,


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they make errors similar to those made by less-skilled readers in Year 3 of primary school (Scholes & Willis, 1987). Similarly, their errors on tasks of derivational morphology (e.g., segmenting words into their constituent morphemes) and infl ectional morphology (e.g., verb agreement) relegate them to Year 2 (Rubin, Patterson & Kantor, 1991). However, a number of these tasks have a metalinguistic component, in that they require participants to refl ect upon linguistic units. Given evidence that metalinguistic awareness develops through the process of formal reading and writing (Eme, Puustinen & Coutelet, 2006; Jacobs & Paris, 1987), poor performances may refl ect limited metalinguistic awareness rather than linguistic diffi culties per se.

Only at the semantic level do A-IL display more highly developed knowledge than chil-dren with the same reading level. As regards vocabulary, they are able to understand and defi ne a greater number of words. However, this effect disappears when they are matched with children in their last year of primary school (Greenberg et al., 1997). As regards oral comprehension, a study by Gold and Johnson (1982) showed that A-IL with a reading level below Year 5 level were no better than children at the end of primary school when it came to answering factual questions about texts. In terms of grade-equivalent scores, their oral comprehension level was higher than their reading level, but lower than their vocabulary level.

Taken together, these results therefore reveal that adults who are functionally illiterate have fairly weak oral language abilities that are closer to their reading age than to their chronological age. These studies also tend to confi rm that A-IL lack homogeneous skills in the area of oral language. As a group, compared with children matched for reading level, they exhibit particular weaknesses in phonological awareness, morphosyntax and metalin-guistics and relative strengths in vocabulary knowledge and factual oral comprehension. Nevertheless, as no study has so far explored this range of spoken language skills within the same group of A-IL, and given the multivariate and heterogeneous nature of oral lan-guage skills, we cannot exclude the possibility that adult literacy students display several distinct patterns of linguistic strengths and weaknesses (or language subtypes; Speece, Roth, Cooper & de la Paz, 1999).

Results of developmental studies of poor readers, in both English and French, support the hypothesis that individuals who have not succeeded in learning to read may present various profi les of reading disability and underlying diffi culties.

First, some dyslexic children suffering from developmental surface dyslexia, which is characterised by a selective defi cit in irregular word reading, show no evidence of impair-ment in phonological processing, but rather in visual-attentional processing (e.g., when searching for a target among distractors; Goulandris & Snowling, 1991; Valdois, 1996). Thus, it has been hypothesised that varieties of reading acquisition disorders originate from different cognitive dysfunctions. A phonological defi cit would thus be the cause of developmental phonological dyslexia, while a visual-attentional problem could be respon-sible for the failure to establish specifi c word knowledge in developmental surface dyslexia (Valdois, Bosse & Tainturier, 2004).

Second, although phonological ability has consistently been found to be the best predic-tor of reading achievement (explaining some 50% of the variance in word recognition), more recent investigations have revealed that socioeconomic background and language experiences interact with phonological awareness to predict individual differences in read-ing. This suggests that the mechanisms underlying poor reading may vary depending on the sociolinguistic context, with multiple risk factors leading to impairment in reading acquisi-tion (Fluss, Bertrand, Ziegler & Billard, 2009; Noble & McCandiss, 2005).


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Finally, above and beyond problems with word recognition, children may have a specifi c reading comprehension impairment (i.e., poor comprehenders), related to impairment in more general language comprehension, even though they seem to have normal phonologi-cal processing abilities (Catts, Fey, Zhang & Tomblin, 1999; Fayol, 2003). Poor compre-henders, as a group, appear to have relative weaknesses across a range of language skills that are important to reading comprehension, encompassing vocabulary, morphosyntax and higher-level aspects of language (Nation et al., 2004). However, considerable variations have been observed, both within the group and across tasks, with the result that no clear profi le has emerged to characterise the whole group. In addition, retrospective epidemio-logical data have revealed that language defi cits in children with poor reading compre-hension may already be present when they start school, although they may not always be clinically apparent (Catts et al., 2006). Nation et al. (2004) refer to this phenomenon as hidden defi cits.

Aims of the present study

In the present study, we measured the reading and spelling abilities of adults who were functionally illiterate against their oral language skills and compared them with children who were matched for reading levels. Its main purpose was to determine the nature and specifi city of their reading and writing diffi culties in relation to their oral language profi le, exploring a range of language skills (at the phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic levels) within the same group, drawn from a large sample of French-speaking adult literacy students.

The present study extended previous research in three ways. First, up to now, most studies devoted to functional illiteracy have been conducted by American researchers with English-speaking participants and have therefore focused on one particular ortho-graphic system and one particular population. Studies dealing with illiteracy in other languages (Portuguese: Morais, Bertelson, Cary & Alegria, 1986; Morais, Cary, Alegria & Bertelson, 1979; Spanish: Ardila, Rosselli & Rosas, 1989; Rosselli, Ardila & Rosas, 1990) have concerned illiterate people in the strictest sense, meaning those unable to read or write at all in any language, which is another issue. The greatest problem with studies in English concerns the fact that English is exceptionally inconsistent in both its GPC rules for reading (a grapheme can have multiple pronunciations) and its PGC rules for spelling (a phoneme can have multiple spellings) (Ziegler, Stone & Jacobs, 1997). These peculiarities mean that there are likely to be differences between reading and spelling development in English and reading and spelling development in other languages. One critical aspect of the French written system is that the GPC used to read words are highly consistent (making it possible to read approximately 90% of French words correctly on this basis; Ziegler, Jacobs & Stone, 1996), whereas PGC used in spelling are far less consistent (making it possible to spell no more than half of bisyllabic French words; Vronis, 1988). The second problem with American studies is that most of the low-level readers included in the samples have been African Americans and Hispanics, so that the participants pronunciation, as well as discrepancies between their spoken dialects and standard English, may be partly responsible for their phonological characteristics (Perin, 1998). Within the French-speaking population, functional illiteracy refers to adults who have no such linguistic peculiarities. French is their mother tongue and they were born in mainland France.


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The second contribution of the present study to the literature concerns the variety of written tasks administered. Whereas the word-reading and word-spelling tasks used in previous studies have yielded information about the phonological skills and lexical knowl-edge of adults who are illiterate, the present study also assessed the comprehension process in reading and morphosyntactic knowledge in spelling (e.g., application of written rules governing gender and number agreement).

The third contribution of the study is to take empirical knowledge about the oral lan-guage skills of A-IL beyond the phonological level. More specifi cally, there have so far been no attempts to compare the skills of individuals within the same group across different linguistic domains in order to ascertain whether A-IL do indeed have a single set of specifi c defi cits or whether instead they display several distinct language patterns. Drawing on Nation et al.s (2004) methodology, we assessed oral language skills in three domains of oral language, namely phonology, morphosyntax and semantics.

To sum up, using the reading-level match design (Jackson & Butterfi eld, 1989), A-IL per-formances were compared with those of normal-reading children on reading tasks designed to assess phonological and lexical word recognition processes, as well as reading comprehen-sion, and on spelling tasks assessing phonological and lexical word transcription processes, as well as basic morphosyntactic knowledge. All participants also underwent a series of oral language tasks measuring their phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic skills. Four questions were addressed: (1) How do adults perform on word-reading and spelling tasks involving phonological and lexical processes compared with children of the same reading level? (2) Do adults and children display a similar oral language profi le or is the adult profi le characterised by specifi c diffi culties? (3) What is the relationship between reading, spelling and oral language in adults who are illiterate? (4) Can we divide A-IL into different language subtypes based on the patterns of their linguistic strengths and weaknesses?

Method

Participants

Fifty-two native French-speaking Caucasian adult literacy students and 52 native French-speaking Caucasian children took part in the study. The group of adult literacy students comprised 27 men and 25 women aged between 17 and 55 years (M = 30.8 and standard deviation [SD] = 11.56 for men, M = 30.5, SD = 9.54 for women). They were all enrolled on an adult literacy programme designed to give them the basic skills they needed to fi nd and hold down a job. It was the fi rst adult programme they had attended. At the time of the study, they had already received 125 hours training on average (min. = 50 hours, max. = 200 hours). They volunteered to take part in the study as part of a comprehensive psycholinguistic assessment designed to identify their reading diffi culties and the best way of alleviating them.

All 52 A-IL had attended all 5 years of French primary school and 42 of them had graduated to secondary school, 35 of them going as far as the third or fourth year and 20 of these transferring to special education classes. The majority left school without any qualifi cations, with only seven earning a secondary school equivalency diploma. They had all been identifi ed as having considerable diffi culty reading and writing, and had been sent on the programme by social services or an employment assistance agency, as they could not aspire to social autonomy in their daily lives or seek further education


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through formal job training programmes. In preliminary interviews, they reported a history of learning diffi culties, with reading and writing skills several years below the level expected for their age. Going by the information contained in their vocational and medical records, none of them had been identifi ed as having speech or hearing problems, or nonverbal learning problems, and none had been treated for a language pathology. Their scores on Cattells Culture-Fair Test (1974) fell within the normal to dull-normal range for fl uid intelligence (according to Wechslers classifi cation), that is, above the 10th percentile. Among the educational goals for their current literacy programme, they chiefl y mentioned gaining job training or a better job, helping their children with their homework and managing their daily lives on their own. Twenty-three of them worked part-time doing unskilled jobs, 21 were jobseekers or unemployed and 8 of them were working towards a vocational qualifi cation. They all came from low-to-modest socioeco-nomic backgrounds (determined on the basis of their parents occupation: offi ce clerks, sales assistants and service workers, agricultural workers, tradespeople, machine opera-tors, basic occupations).

The control group consisted of 27 boys and 25 girls, who had never repeated a year and who were in their fi rst year (mean age = 6.7 years), second year (mean age = 7.7 years) or third year (mean age = 8.8 years) of French primary school. They had each been matched with an adult in the sample on the basis of their scores on a standardised reading test taken from a French clinical language scale designed for psycholinguistic assessments (L2MA; Chevrie-Muller, Simon & Fournier, 1997). This test requires par-ticipants to read unfi nished sentences of increasing diffi culty and to complete them by ticking one of fi ve possible answers (e.g., Aprs une semaine charge, il est agrable de se (a) scher, (b) chasser, (c) raser, (d) reposer, (e) rpondre At the end of a busy week, its nice to be able to (a) dry oneself, (b) hunt, (c) shave, (d) rest, (e) reply). This test was chosen because it provides a composite measure of reading skills with norms established for primary school pupils. The sentence completion measure takes into account the whole process of reading, encompassing accuracy of word identifi cation, identifi cation speed and meaning integration, allowing adults and children to be matched on reading effi ciency rather than on subcomponent processes. On this basis, 20 fi rst-year pupils were matched with 20 adults with the lowest reading level on the test (Level 1), 15 second-year pupils were matched with 15 intermediate-level adults (Level 2) and 17 third-year pupils were matched with the 17 highest scoring adults (Level 3). All the childrens scores corresponded to the median score for their age group. Table 1 shows

Table 1. Number of participants and mean standardised reading test scores of A-IL and children as a function of reading level.

Year 1 = Level 1 Year 2 = Level 2 Year 3 = Level 3

Adults Gender 14 M/6 F 6 M/9 F 7 M/10 F L2MA Mean 7.57 27.90 70.27 L2MA SD 5.63 7.92 24.90Children Gender 13 M/7 F 7 M/8 F 7 M/10 F L2MA Mean 7.15 27.93 70.09

L2MA SD 5.54 6.90 24.35

Note: M = Male; F = Female; SD = standard deviation.


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the mean and SD scores on the standardised reading test and the male/female distribution for each group at each level.

Material

The psycholinguistic assessment protocol was based on Nation et al.s (2004) methodol-ogy; it included reading and spelling tasks, and oral language tasks tapping three domains of oral language: phonology, morphosyntax and semantics. The material was adapted for the adults from the L2MA scale, on the basis of previous observations of adult literacy students (Eme, 2006; Eme, Lacroix & Almecija, 2010).

Reading tasks

The pseudoword-reading task (55 items) assessed the effectiveness of the phonological process of applying GPC rules. It consisted in reading aloud pseudowords made up of the most frequent graphemes in French (Catach, 1980), including simple consonant-vowel (CV) type structures (pa, bo, gi), structures containing a complex grapheme (ch, gne, ou, oin) or a CC- or CCC-type consonant cluster (stu, bli, stra), polysyllabic items (natoralit) and ones involving contextual rules (asso, dation).

The word-reading task (20 items) assessed the lexical process of word recognition with-in a given time limit. Participants were asked to read aloud high-frequency regular words of varying length (mono- vs multi-syllabic: sel salt vs samedi Saturday) and graphemic complexity (animal animalchaussure shoe). In both tasks, we counted the number of items that were correctly read without stumbling or hesitating.

The written comprehension task (eight items) consisted in reading an 83-word exposi-tory text taken from a health education newsletter on the subject of tetanus. Participants then had to respond orally to factual or inferential questions, referring to the text if they wished. The number of correct responses out of eight was recorded.

Spelling tasks

The pseudoword-spelling task (20 items) assessed the phonological process of applying PGC rules. Participants were asked to transcribe pseudowords of varying length and gra-phemic complexity ([ti], [jr], [gamil], [durl], etc.). We counted the number of transcrip-tions that obeyed the PGC rules for the French language (e.g., [jr] can be transcribed as jeur, geur, jeure, jeurs, etc.).

The text dictation task consisted in writing a 48-word text based on the Tetanus article that had been read out to participants. We counted the number of correctly spelled words, the number of nonresponses (blank or stating I dont know) and the number of errors (1) at the lexical level on lexical morphemes (maladie disease maladi; 39 items) and (2) at the morphosyntactic level on the grammatical morphemes (les microbes the microbes les microbe, en se piquant pricking oneself en se pique; 27 items). The index for lexical errors was the ratio of words containing a lexical error to written words (whether correctly or incorrectly spelled; nonresponses were excluded). The same calculation was made for the index of grammatical errors. In order to obtain an index of phonological pro-cessing in word spelling, the lexical errors were categorised according to the congruence of the word transcriptions with the usual PGC rules, either as phonologically acceptable (PA) errors, when transcription was congruent (maladie disease maladi), or as phono-logically inaccurate (PI) errors, when transcription was not congruent (maladie malati).


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Oral language tasks

Phonology. The word repetition task (10 items) measured the participants phonological ability to reproduce orally presented words featuring a complicated phonemic organisa-tion, such as consonant clusters (sketch [skt] sketch) or consonants belonging to the same phonetic category (e.g., the postalveolar fricatives and in chasse-neige [asn] snow-plough).

The phonological recall task (Digit Span Forward; Wechsler, 1996), measuring pho-nological short-term memory, consisted in repeating series of digits of increasing length (max. = 9) in the right order.

The phoneme deletion (12 items) and inversion (10 items) tasks measured the phonolog-ical awareness required to segment and blend phonemic units in oral language. Participants were asked to say what a word would be if the initial phoneme were removed (in a CV or CCV structure, [frit] [rit]), and if the two or three phonemes making it up were inverted ([byt] [tyb]). Morphosyntax. The sentence recall task (six items) gauged the ability to reproduce syn-tactic structures. Participants had to repeat sentences of increasing length and syntactic complexity word for word.

The morphosyntactic integration task (12 items) measured the comprehension and pro-duction of morphological markers (infl ected forms for tense, passive voice, gender and number agreement) or cohesion markers (anaphoric pronouns, connectives). Participants had to complete a target sentence by performing a grammatical transformation prompted by a sentence cue (Aujourdhui, japporte mon djeuner. Demain aussi, ? Today Im bringing my lunch. Tomorrow as well, ?). One point was awarded for each morphosyn-tactically correct target sentence (e.g., japporterai mon djeuner I will bring my lunch, je lapporterai I will bring it, je vais lapporter Im going to bring it, etc.).

Semantics. The antonym (10 items) and vocabulary (20 items) tasks measured the level of word-meaning knowledge. In the former, participants had to produce a word with an op-posite meaning to the target word (lourd heavy lger light). In the second, they had to provide defi nitions for spoken words of decreasing familiarity (horloge clock, portrait portrait, hrditaire hereditary).

The oral comprehension task (nine items) measured the ability to integrate the meaning of interconnected sentences, requiring participants to respond to factual and inferential questions about a narrative text that had been read out to them twice, to avoid a memory effect.

Procedure

All the participants performed the tasks in the same order: oral language, reading and spell-ing. These tasks were preceded by a 15-minute interview conducted by the experimenter in order to establish a reassuring interpersonal relationship with the participant and gather personal information about his or her schooling, family background and occupational sta-tus. For the purposes of the actual assessment, the experimenter used a recording book-let containing all the instructions, items and response sheets, and gave each participant a trainee booklet for the spelling tasks. The instructions were accompanied by examples and practice trials, and each task began with a few warm-up items, when corrections and expla-nations were provided in the event of failure. There was also a set of criteria for halting the


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tasks if necessary. The tasks involving oral responses were recorded and transcribed in full. The reading material was printed in 14-point Arial Narrow font on A4-size plastic-coated cards. The booklets were double coded that, in some cases, consisted in fi lling in coding grids printed in a user manual in order to achieve 100% inter-rater agreement. Breaks were taken before embarking on the written language tasks and could also be taken at any other time, at the participants request. It took approximately 2 hours to complete the entire set of tasks, which were performed over one or two sessions.

Results

Four series of analyses were conducted on the data to pinpoint the overall tendencies characterising A-IL performances on written and oral language, compared with those of the children, and to highlight inter-individual variability in A-IL language profi les. The analyses consisted in (1) comparing the performances of the A-IL and matched children on the reading and spelling component measures, and (2) on the oral language tasks, (3) examining the correlations between the written and oral language measures for A-IL and children and (4) identifying different language subtypes in the A-IL group on the basis of participants performances on the oral language tasks.

Comparison of A-IL and children on the reading and spelling tasks

In order to compare the adults and children on the various tasks, analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted for independent groups, with Reader Group (adults vs chil-dren) and Reading Level (Year 1, Year 2, Year 3) as between-participants factors. The mean scores of the adults and children on each task (expressed as percentages of the maximum total score) are set out in Table 2 (top), together with the results of the statistical tests. Whenever there was a signifi cant effect of group, the effect size (partial 2) is shown. Mean performances of groups as a function of level are depicted in Figure 1.

In the reading tasks, the adult literacy students and children matched for reading level achieved the same scores on word reading and text comprehension, but not on pseudoword reading. In the latter, the adults correctly decoded fewer pseudowords than the children, which meant that they generally produced more errors such as graphemic simplifi cation (stu [sety]; on [o]), letter order inversion (clo [k l]) and substitution between pho-nologically close graphemes (pb, vf, mn, gc). This can be regarded as a medium effect (partial .06; Cohen, 1977), indicating that the A-IL had greater diffi culty applying GPC rules. Level had a signifi cant effect on all the reading measures, attesting to the sensi-tivity of the tasks, but there was no signifi cant interaction with Group.

Similarly, in spelling, while the two groups did not differ in the dictation task on cor-rect word spelling or the frequency of lexical or grammatical errors, the adults provided fewer correct transcriptions in pseudoword spelling, which meant that they produced more simplifi cations of complex graphemes ([] o; [] i), letter order inversions ([mabl] mabel) and letter omissions ([trymir] tru, tumire; [kabo] kbau). This can be regarded as a medium effect. In addition, in the dictation task, the adults had a higher nonresponse rate than the children, and among the spelling errors, their proportion of PI errors was signifi cantly higher, F(1, 98) = 15.80, p < .001, whereas their proportion of PA errors was somewhat lower, F(1, 98) = 3.95, p < .05. This last effect could be described as a large ef-fect (partial .14; Cohen, 1977). Thus, while the adult literacy students did not make signifi cantly more word-spelling errors than the children, they showed greater diffi culties


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in applying the PGC rules, with the conversion process often resulting either in a transcrip-tion that did not phonologically correspond to the dictated word or in a nonresponse. Level had a signifi cant effect on all the spelling measures, but there was no signifi cant interaction with Group. Overall, these results can be interpreted as an argument in favour of the speci-fi city of A-IL regarding reading and spelling processing.

Comparison of A-IL and children on oral language tasks

The mean performances of the two groups on each task (expressed as percentages of the maximum total score) are set out in Table 2 (bottom) and in Figure 2, as a function of level. The Group effect was signifi cant for all but one measure.

On tasks tapping phonological skills, adult literacy students systematically performed less well than the reading level-matched children. These effects can be described as me-dium (for phonological recall and phoneme deletion) to large (for word repetition and phoneme inversion). Performances on all tasks increased with level. The Group Level interaction was only signifi cant for word repetition; post hoc comparisons (Tukeys HSD

Table 2. Mean performances of A-IL and children and ANOVA results.

Adults Children

mean SD mean SD Group Group Level Group effect effect effect Level effect size F(1, 98) F(2, 98) F(2, 98)

Reading tasks Pseudoword reading 71.2 24.23 82.3 22.64 .09 9.50** 34.17*** F < 1Word reading 89.1 21.82 89.1 23.70 F < 1 22.57*** F < 1Text comprehension 48.8 27.48 45.4 25.00 F < 1 30.43*** 1.29 ns

Spelling tasks Pseudoword spelling 54.0 27.44 70.0 22.90 .12 13.90*** 20.93*** F < 1Dictation word spelling 50.2 27.91 50.7 19.22 F

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test for unequal sample sizes; Spjotvoll & Stoline, 1973) revealed that the children signifi -cantly outperformed A-IL at Level 1 (p < .001), but not at Levels 2 and 3 (p > .05).

On the tasks assessing morphosyntactic skills, the adults signifi cantly outperformed the children on morphosyntactic integration (with a small effect size, partial < .06; Cohen, 1977), while there was no signifi cant group difference for sentence recall. Level had a signifi cant effect in both tasks, but the Group Level interactions were not signifi cant.

On tasks assessing semantic skills, there was a signifi cant interaction between Group and Level. Post hoc analyses revealed that the adults performed signifi cantly better than the children at Levels 1 and 2 on the antonym task (p < .01 and p < .05), the vocabulary task (p < .05 and p < .01) and the oral comprehension task (p < .05 and p < .05), but there was no signifi cant difference between the groups at Level 3 (p > .10).

To summarise, A-IL performances on the oral language tasks mirrored their written perfor-mances, highlighting specifi c diffi culties in phonological processing compared with the chil-dren. Conversely, the adults outdid the children on morphosyntactic and semantic processing, at least at reading Levels 1 and 2. At the third reading level, they lost their semantic advantage.

Qualitative analysis of A-IL responses in the oral language tasks

To further characterise the oral language performance of the A-IL group, we studied the types of errors they made in each domain. The errors produced by A-IL in the word rep-etition task were similar to those of the youngest children: deletion in consonant clusters (obscurit [oskyrite]), substitutions between close phonemes (chasse-neige [san]) and deletions in long items (cosmopolitisme [kosmokotilis]. In most cases, items were recognisable but were not accurately reproduced. These types of errors suggested that dif-fi culties affected both the production and storage of phonemic units. This was confi rmed by performance on the phonological recall task, where adult students recalled 4.4 digits in the right order on average, attesting to their poor phonological short-term memory (the normal range of short-term memory capacity is 7 2 chunks; Miller, 1956). In the phonological awareness tasks, A-IL had particular diffi culty with the segmentation of consonant clusters (e.g., [f r]) and phoneme blending.

In morphosyntactic integration, A-IL were better than children at producing the cor-rectly infl ected forms for tense, gender and number agreement. However, they produced similar errors to those made by children of the same reading level in manipulating cohesion markers, in that they failed to link dependent propositions by connectors (I was sick I called the doctor) or to fi nd the correct pronoun to maintain a referent (I speak to friends, I speak to ). In sentence recall, as for children, their lowest scores refl ected diffi culty re-producing the syntactic form of the sentences rather than their meaning (e.g., Mon collgue est all acheter un magazine My colleague went to buy a magazine Mon collgue a t achet un magazine).

In vocabulary, A-IL provided a higher number of defi nitions than children for concrete words (horloge, abeille) and terms of practical life (prim); they made the same types of errors as children relative to incomplete representations (portrait portrait cest une photo its a photo; le island une belle plage au bord de la mer a nice beach at the seaside), and gave many nonresponses for abstract words (aberrant aberrant, pertinent relevant, polmique polemic). In the antonym task, many of their errors consisted of answers whose meaning was related to the target word but was formulated wrongly (la veille the day before ctait hier soir it was yesterday evening; (coupable guilty cest pas lui its not him), refl ecting diffi culty speaking about words, rather than a lack of knowledge. In oral comprehension, A-IL outperformed the youngest children in


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the number of correct answers to wh- questions (who, where, when, etc.), showing their understanding of the thematic elements of the story. However, they encountered the same diffi culty as younger children in inferring implicit meanings (Que ressent Marie en voyant les enfants? What does Marie feel when she sees the children?) from explicit information (Elle sest prcipite pour les aider She rushed forward to help them), and in integrat-ing sentences to extract the gist of the story (e.g., providing a title).

Relationship between written and oral skills in A-IL and children

Correlations (Pearsons r coeffi cients) were computed separately for the two groups of readers in order to examine the relationship between reading and spelling on the one hand and oral language skills on the other. In order to simplify the correlation matrix, three composite oral variables were derived. The fi rst criterion of the derivation was that scores must belong to the same domain and be characterised by notable to strong correlations. Phonological awareness was derived by averaging standardised individual scores (z scores) for phoneme deletion and phoneme inversion (r = .73), Morphosyntax was derived by av-eraging z scores for sentence recall and morphosyntactic integration (r = .66) and lexical knowledge, by averaging z scores for antonyms and vocabulary (r = .53).

Partwhole correlations were determined between the individual variables and the com-posite variables to which they belonged, in order to further justify the formation of these composites (.96 and .92 for phoneme deletion and phoneme inversion with phonological awareness, .94 and .87 for sentence recall and morphosyntactic integration with Morpho-syntax and .91 and .84 for antonyms and vocabulary with Lexical knowledge). The remain-ing oral variables with lower intradomain correlations (word repetition, phonological recall and oral comprehension; r < .50) were entered into the analysis as separate scores. Interdo-main correlation patterns were unchanged by the formation of simplifi ed, composite vari-ables. Table 3 sets out the correlation coeffi cients between the oral and written language variables for A-IL (top) and children (bottom).

Table 3. Inter-task correlation coeffi cients (Pearsons r) for the A-IL and the children

Word rep. Phonol. recall Phonol. awar. Morphosyntax Lexic. knowl. Oral comp.

Adults Pseudoword reading .70*** .48*** .77*** .54*** .31* .20Word reading .45** .37** .53*** .42** .20 .27Text comprehension .63*** .55*** .65*** .63*** .48*** .50***Pseudoword spelling .67*** .52*** .87*** .49*** .39** .30*Word spelling .73*** .46** .70*** .51*** .17 .10 Lexical items .71*** .48*** .69*** .49*** .19 .12 Grammatical items .76*** .46** .71*** .59*** .24 .24

Children Pseudoword reading .52*** .33** .75*** .54*** .50*** .38**Word reading .49*** .34** .70*** .42** .44** .33**Text comprehension .49*** .40** .57*** .63*** .71*** .53***Pseudoword spelling .50*** .40** .82*** .49*** .54*** .38**Word spelling .47*** .25 .73*** .47*** .57*** .39** Lexical items .47*** .26 .72*** .47*** .50*** .39** Grammatical items .59*** .27* .67*** .44** .48*** .32*

Note: *Signifi cant correlations at p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001.Word rep. = word repetition; Phonol. recall = phonological recall; Phonol. awar. = phonological awareness; Lexic. knowl = lexical knowledge; Oral comp. = oral comprehension.


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Regarding A-IL, Table 3 highlights numerous signifi cant links between written and oral language. More specifi cally, oral phonological tasks and morphosyntax were strongly cor-related with all the reading and spelling tasks, with a particularly close relationship between word repetition and phonological awareness on the one hand and pseudoword-reading and spelling tasks on the other. Oral phonological skills were also closely correlated with text comprehension that, in turn, was particularly closely correlated with lexical knowledge and oral comprehension. Correlations between these semantic measures and other reading and spelling tasks were fewer and much weaker: small correlations were only observed with pseudoword processing.

In children, the correlations between written and oral skills appeared to be relatively similar in signifi cance and strength to the correlations observed in adults for phonology and morphosyntax. Better performances on these tasks were associated with better reading and spelling, for both words and pseudowords. Differences emerged between adults and children on semantic skills, as children displayed signifi cant medium to strong correlations between lexical knowledge and oral comprehension on the one hand and all the reading and spelling tasks on the other.

To conclude, the correlation pattern was more contrasted in A-IL than in children. In A-IL, phonological and morphosyntactic skills were strongly correlated with all the com-ponents of reading and spelling, whereas semantic skills (lexical knowledge and oral com-prehension) were correlated mainly with the semantic component of reading (i.e., writ-ten comprehension). This last correlation rules out the possibility that the lack of reliable semantic measures for adults might explain differences in their pattern of correlations. In addition, this pattern was consistent with previous studies (Greenberg et al., 1997) show-ing less consistent correlations in A-IL than in children, this being attributed to closer integration in children of the processes involved in reading acquisition. More specifi cally, this pattern suggests that for adults, diffi culties in reading and spelling are associated with diffi culties in phonology and morphosyntax but not necessarily in semantics. Conversely, poor semantic performance is not systematically associated with poor basic skills. One can therefore infer that different types of diffi culties may affect different individuals: some may display specifi c weaknesses in phonological-morphosyntactic aspects that alter their read-ing and spelling skills, while others may exhibit specifi c weaknesses in semantic aspects. In order to confi rm this interpretation and elucidate the relationship between literacy skills and oral language in A-IL, a cluster analysis was conducted.

Looking for oral language subtypes within the A-IL group

The fourth series of analyses was intended to identify and validate different subtypes of language profi les within the A-IL group, on the basis of individual performances on the oral language measures. The aim was to ascertain whether there was any evidence for different subtypes of participants with different patterns of language strengths and weak-nesses. For example, we predicted that some adults would exhibit a specifi c weakness in phonology, while others would exhibit a more general weakness in all oral language tasks.

Cluster analysis. In order to classify the individual language profi les, a cluster analysis was performed on the oral language data of the A-IL. The six variables of the correlation analysis (word repetition, phonological recall, phonological awareness, morphosyntax, lexical knowledge and oral comprehension), with individual A-IL scores transformed into z scores, were entered into the cluster analysis. We chose to use Wards method, a clustering


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method that is widely used in the social sciences because of its robust results (Blashfi eld & Aldenderfer, 1988; Morey, Blashfi eld & Skinner, 1983). An examination of the hierarchi-cal tree representing the distances between individuals and the combined clusters led us to identify four clusters (accounting for 68.3% of the total variance) as the most appropriate solution, on the basis of a trade-off between the number of clusters (as low as possible) and within-cluster dispersion.

A tentative interpretation of this classifi cation was formed by examining the mean z-score profi les. Figure 3 presents the mean scores for cluster members on the six oral lan-guage measures. To validate our classifi cation, we performed ANOVAs on each measure, with Cluster as a between-groups factor, and pair-wise comparisons (Tukeys HSD). The external validity of the cluster classifi cation was checked against between-group compari-sons on the reading and spelling measures.

Cluster description. The results of the ANOVAs showed that overall differences between clusters were signifi cant for all the measures, F(3, 48) = 25.59, p < .001, for Word repeti-tion; F(3, 48) = 13.63, p < .001, for Phonological recall; F(3, 48) = 22.21, p < .001, for Phonological awareness; F(3, 48) = 61.76, p < .001, for Morphosyntax; F(3, 48) = 25.09, p < .001, for Lexical knowledge; and F(3, 48) = 8.94, p < .001, for Oral comprehension.

Cluster 1 (n = 17) displayed a consistently high level of performance across all aspects of language, with all scores being well above the mean. Conversely, Cluster 4 (n = 9) dis-played a low pattern of performance, scoring at least one SD below the mean on all the oral language tasks. Two intermediate clusters, Clusters 2 (n = 14) and 3 (n = 12), showed con-trasting patterns. Cluster 2 showed weaknesses at the phonological level (in Word repeti-tion and Phonological awareness) and, to a lesser extent, in Morphosyntax, but strengths in Lexical knowledge and Oral comprehension. Cluster 3 displayed the opposite pattern, with poorer performances on Lexical knowledge and Oral comprehension, and higher perfor-mances on Word repetition and Phonological awareness. Post hoc comparisons confi rmed that Cluster 3 performances were signifi cantly poorer than those of Cluster 1 (p < .01 and p < .05 for all the tasks), but signifi cantly higher than those of Cluster 2 on Word repetition

Cluster 1Cluster 2Cluster 3Cluster 4

-1,2

-0,8

-0,4

0,0

0,4

0,8

1,2

Word rep Phono recall Phono awar Morph syntax Lexic knowl Oral CompFigure 3. Profi les of oral language clusters (z scores).


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and Phonological awareness (p < .05 for both; nonsignifi cant difference on Morphosyntax, p > .10), and higher than those of Cluster 4 on all three tasks (p < .001, p < .01 and p < .01). Conversely, Cluster 2 did not signifi cantly differ from Cluster 1 on Lexical knowledge and Oral comprehension (p > .10 for both) and signifi cantly outperformed Cluster 3 for Lexi-cal knowledge (p < .01; p > .10 for Oral comprehension) and Cluster 4 for both tasks (p < .001 and p < .05). In short, the analysis made it possible to identify four different profi les of language skills: a high profi le, a low profi le, an average profi le with strength in lexical knowledge and an average profi le with strength in phonological skills. On the whole, this classifi cation was validated by statistical comparisons.

Concurrent validity of the cluster classifi cation. We expected that clusters (C) that dif-fered on language profi les would also differ on literacy performance. More specifi cally, we predicted that subtypes with better phonological skills would perform better on the pseudoword reading and spelling measures (predicted contrasts: C1 > C2C3 > C4; C3 > C2), subtypes with better semantic skills would have higher word-reading and text com-prehension scores (C1C2C3 > C4; C1C2 > C3; C2 > C3) and the subtype with the best oral language profi le would achieve higher text comprehension and reading-level match scores (L2MA), these measures encompassing phonological decoding, word recognition and meaning construction (C1 > C2; C1 > C3).

Table 4 shows the distribution of cluster members across reading levels. Table 5 displays the mean performances for each cluster on the reading and spelling tasks.

ANOVAs on reading and spelling measures, with Cluster as a between-participants fac-tor, showed signifi cant main effects for all measures, F(3, 48) = 6.69, p < .001, for the reading-level match score; F(3, 48) = 16.22, p < .001, for pseudoword reading; F(3, 48) = 7.44, p < .001, for word reading; F(3, 48) = 16.78, p < .001, for text comprehension; F(3, 48) = 13.66, p < .001, for pseudoword spelling; F(3, 48) = 13.09, p < .001, for word spelling; F(3, 48) = 13.13, p < .001, for lexical items; and F(3, 48) = 11,76, p < .001, for grammatical items. Planned orthogonal comparisons for the predicted contrasts are set out in Table 6. The signifi cance threshold was set at p = .05 after Bonferroni correction. Out

Table 4. Distribution of cluster members across reading levels.

Cluster 1 n = 17 Cluster 2 n = 14 Cluster 3 n = 12 Cluster 4 n = 9

Level 1 3 7 3 7Level 2 6 5 3 1Level 3 8 2 6 1

Table 5. Mean performance on reading and spelling measures by groups formed by cluster analysis.

Cluster 1 n = 17 Cluster 2 n = 14 Cluster 3 n = 12 Cluster 4 n = 9

Pseudoword reading 87.3 60.4 82.7 42.4Word reading 98.8 84.3 98.3 66.1Text comprehension 69.1 42.9 54.2 12.5L2MA 52.5 17.9 41.3 12.8Pseudoword spelling 75.3 46.4 56.7 22.2Word spelling 69.2 29.5 62.8 29.6 Lexical items 75.9 38.0 75.7 33.1 Grammatical items 76.7 38.8 63.9 34.6


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of 15 predicted comparisons, 12 were signifi cant, and 1 was marginally signifi cant, in the expected direction.

Discussion

The aim of the present study was to examine the processes used by adults who are function-ally illiterate (A-IL) to read and spell words, with a view to determining whether A-IL use the same reading processes as reading level-matched children, or whether they experience specifi c diffi culties. A second objective was to determine whether the reading diffi culties of A-IL are related to their other language skills. We set out to answer the following ques-tions: (1) Do adults and children perform similarly on word reading and spelling tasks measuring phonological and lexical processes? (2) How do adults perform on other lan-guage tasks compared with children of the same reading level? (3) What is the relationship between written and oral performances in adults who are functionally illiterate in compari-son with reading level-matched children? (4) Do A-IL performances on oral language tasks refl ect different subtypes? To do so, 52 adult literacy students were compared with children matched on a standardised reading test in a variety of reading, spelling and oral language tasks designed to measure their skills at different levels of processing.

Taken together, results showed that the adults had a qualitatively different profi le from that of the children, characterised by impairment not only in their use of phonological processes to identify and transcribe written words, but also in their repetition, recall and analysis of phonological units in oral language tasks.

In reading, the main problems displayed by A-IL concerned pseudowords: although they were familiar with the names of the letters and basic GPC rules, they had not mastered the more complex rules and had greater diffi culty than the reading level-matched children decoding words they had never encountered. The A-IL performed better on lexical recogni-tion, achieving the same scores as the children. They were generally able to identify con-tent words, indicating that they had built up an orthographic lexicon of frequently occur-ring words that enabled them to grasp the drift of individual sentences or short texts. This

Table 6. Planned comparisons for the predicted contrasts.

Predicted contrast F ANOVA

Pseudoword reading C1 > C2C3 > C4 F(2, 48) = 23.83, p < .001 C3 > C2 F(1, 48) = 10.40, p < .001Word reading C2 > C3 F(1, 48) = 3.06, p < .10 C2C3 > C4 F(1, 48) = 12.27, p < .01Text comprehension C2 > C3 F(1, 48) = 2.11, p > .10 ns C2C3 > C4 F(1, 48) = 22.10, p < .001L2MA C1 > C2 F(1, 48) = 13.08, p < .001Pseudoword spelling C1 > C2C3 > C4 F(2, 48) = 19.64, p < .001 C3 > C2 F(1, 48) = 1.57, p > .10 nsWord spelling C1 > C2C3 > C4 F(2, 48) = 11.43, p < .001 C3 > C2 F(1, 48) = 15.69, p < .001Lexical items C1 > C2C3 > C4 F(2, 48) = 10.62, p < .001 C3 > C2 F(1, 48) = 17.78, p < .001Grammatical items C1 > C2C3 > C4 F(2, 48) = 12.92, p < .001 C3 > C2 F(1, 48) = 8.81, p < .01


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was confi rmed by the comments they made while reading: they pointed out the words they knew or did not know, often making no attempt to decode the latter. Nevertheless, these lexical representations were incomplete (witness the word-reading and comprehension error rates), and even though they enabled the A-IL to recognise written words and access meaning, they in no way compensated for their word-decoding diffi culties.

The adult literacy students displayed even greater diffi culties in spelling than in read-ing. This can be ascribed to the fact that spelling is more phonologically demanding than reading (Sprenger-Charolles et al., 2003) and therefore contradicts the received idea that adults who are illiterate write phonetically. The pseudoword-spelling task showed that, compared with the matched children, the adults knew the simple PGC rules but were un-familiar with the more complex ones, leading to higher error rates. In the text dictation task, their level of orthographic knowledge was found to be relatively high at the lexi-cal and grammatical levels, as their scores were no different from those of the children. Their pattern of errors was somewhat different, however, as they had a higher nonresponse rate than the children, and their spelling errors included far more PI errors, such as sound substitutions or omissions (maladie malati), and fewer PA errors, corresponding to cor-rect phonological transcription (maladi). This suggests that the adults were less able or willing than the children to write a word they did not know on the basis of what they had heard. Their spelling errors not only refl ected specifi c diffi culties with the phonemegraph-eme transcription system, but also highlighted the peculiarities of the French language, including the complexity of its graphemes, the weak predictability of its PGC rules and the orally imperceptible boundaries between words. These problems doubtless sprang from a poor level of decoding in reading, considerably reducing their acquisition of orthographic knowledge (Share, 1995).

The adult literacy students therefore performed differently on the written language tasks from the reading level-matched children, as they had greater diffi culty with the phonologi-cal processing needed to decode and transcribe unknown words (or pseudowords), than they did with orthographic processing. The A-IL performance profi le on the oral tasks was similarly contrasted, in that they performed more poorly than the children on the pho-nological tasks: word repetition, digit recall, phoneme deletion and inversion. This effect was particularly noticeable for the latter, which requires both the storage and processing of phonemic units, as does the phonological transcription of words. Conversely, the adults outdid the children on the other oral language tasks in morphosyntax and semantics, except for sentence recall, where there was no difference between groups. Nevertheless, at Level 3, A-IL lost their semantic advantage.

Thus, the written and oral language performances of the A-IL as a group would appear to reveal a phonological impairment associated with their illiteracy, insofar as their per-formances were signifi cantly and specifi cally poorer than those of the matched children on all the phonological tasks. Furthermore, A-IL phonological skills were strongly cor-related with their reading and spelling performances more strongly so than the other oral language skills. On this basis and on the basis of developmental models (e.g., Ehri, 1987; Share, 1995), we can assume that phonological impairment is behind the diffi culty ex-perienced by A-IL in accessing literacy. This assumption is congruent with the hypothesis of a functional link between illiteracy and developmental dyslexia supported by earlier fi ndings (Delahaie et al., 2000; Greenberg et al., 1997; Thompkins & Binder, 2003). Pre-vious studies have reported specifi c impairment of the phonological processing of words and phonological awareness in adults who are illiterate. The present study provides ad-ditional evidence of this impairment, and for a more consistent orthography (at least for


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GPC rules), illustrating how it also affects spelling and oral language. For some of our participants, illiteracy could therefore be a case of developmental dyslexia or dysortho-graphia. Detection in childhood could have resulted in a proper diagnosis and remedial treatment. Instead of which, combined with an unfavourable socioeducational environment (poor material conditions and/or troubled family background), it prevented access to the alphabetic code, leading individuals to abandon reading and, gradually, to abandon school. This model is compatible with recent epidemiologic data yielded by two French studies (Billard et al., 2008; Fluss et al., 2009) showing that (1) reading impairment is highly in-fl uenced by the general socioeconomic environment and (2) in individuals with the lowest socioeconomic status, reading outcome is even better predicted by phonological awareness skills; moreover, (3) the provision of remedial teaching for language-delayed children is far poorer in deprived areas (e.g., educational priority areas) than elsewhere, despite the fact that delays are far more frequent (Watier, Chevrie-Muller & Dellatolas, 2006). It is nonetheless diffi cult to reach any fi rm conclusion as to the specifi c nature of the phonologi-cal defi cit in illiteracy, as the presence of behavioural signs does not necessarily imply an underlying cognitive problem (Morton & Frith, 1995) and more investigations are needed to fully understand how a cognitive factor, such as phonological awareness, interacts with a childs background and experiences (Noble & McCandiss, 2005).

Although the adults, as a group, generally performed better than the children on the oral language tasks in the domains of morphosyntax and semantics, attesting to the specifi city of their phonological impairment, their scores on these tasks were nonetheless far lower than those expected from adults. Moreover, by Level 3, adults had ceased to display an advantage in vocabulary and oral comprehension. Greenberg et al. (1997) observed an analogous form of interaction when they administered the receptive vocabulary test. One explanation for the adults larger vocabulary and better comprehension in the fi rst two levels is that their greater experience had exposed them to more words and scripts. The disappearance of these advantages at Level 3 (Year 5 in Greenberg et al.s study) illustrates the fact that natural exposure to speech and social experience does not contribute to oral language development as much as exposure to written language (Stanovich & Cunningham, 1993). The reading diffi culties of A-IL hampered the development of their oral skills inso-far as written culture, at some developmental point when written texts become richer and more complex than oral discourses, represents a defi ning factor in language development that cannot be replaced by oral and social experience. From this perspective, the correla-tions between text comprehension and the semantic component of the oral tasks can be interpreted as resulting from a reciprocal relationship, in that oral language experiences contribute to learning to read that, in turn, improves vocabulary knowledge and discourse processes (Cain, 2003).

Furthermore, cluster analyses revealed that adults who are illiterate are not affected by phonological impairment or oral language diffi culties to the same extent. Four groups with different profi les of language skills were identifi ed: a high profi le, with a consistently high level of performance relative to the sample across all domains of oral language; a low pro-fi le, with a low pattern of performance across all domains; an average profi le, with weak-nesses in phonological skills but strengths in semantics; and an average profi le, with the opposite pattern, namely weaknesses in semantics and strengths at the phonological level. This classifi cation was mostly validated by statistical comparisons, and the main expected effects of the cluster groups were signifi cant on reading and spelling variables. It would have been interesting to look for a similar classifi cation among the children, although the pattern of correlations suggests that we would not have found one, given the groups


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greater homogeneity. In A-IL, the different profi les may have refl ected varying trajectories and multiple risk factors leading to impairment in reading acquisition and to functional illiteracy: on the one hand, being deprived of adequate sociocultural or socioemotional ex-periences, with specifi c repercussions on learning to read, and on the other, being affected by cognitive language disorders, be they phonological, semantic or mixed. This classi-fi cation needs to be replicated and validated with a larger sample size and standardised measures. Additional retrospective and multiple case studies with standardised measures would allow us to determine whether some of the A-IL meet the diagnostic criteria for language impairments (Nation et al., 2004). Future research should allow us to emphasise differences between adults who possibly suffer from unidentifi ed developmental language disorders of cognitive origins, and adults who failed to learn to read because of environ-mental factors (Morton & Frith, 1995).

One of the practical implications of this study is that it specifi es the nature of the diffi cul-ties encountered by A-IL, taking into account various components of literacy tasks and a range of oral language skills likely to subtend their reading and spelling impairment. These components and skills are largely ignored in adult training programmes, which focus on the teaching and assessment of basic skills, rather than on the prerequisites for learning. For example, giving phonological training to A-IL who display substantial phonological diffi culties associated with poor reading levels would lead to enhanced learning. More generally, oral language practice sessions should be included in learning programmes. The identifi cation of clusters or subtypes (Strucker, 1997) holds out the possibility of more ac-curately tailoring adult literacy training content to participants particular modes of func-tioning, scaffolding their strong points and overcoming their weak points through training. Cognitive training provided in experimental studies has already yielded positive results in adult education in terms of phonological awareness (Durgunoglu & ney, 2002), cognitive functioning (Ardila, Ostrosky-Solis & Mendoza, 2000; Ostrosky-Solis, Lozano, Ramirez & Ardila, 2007) and text comprehension (Rich & Shepherd, 1993). Regrettably, these fi nd-ings have not been widely disseminated and, in France at least, do not appear to have had any impact on adult education.

To conclude, adults who are illiterate display different reading and spelling acquisition processes from reading level-matched children, with different performance profi les and pat-terns of errors. More specifi cally, compared with the children in our study, the A-IL group as a whole exhibited greater diffi culty with the phonological processing of words than with orthographic processing. Similarly, their oral language skills appeared to be more impaired in the domain of phonology than in the domains of morphosyntax and semantics. Further-more, the adult literacy group could be divided into subgroups based on the patterns of their linguistic strengths and weaknesses. These different profi les could result from various trajectories leading to functional illiteracy and open up new possibilities for remedial action.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our warmest gratitude to Christine Delliaux and Nicolas Nantes for the assistance we received from the Entraide Sociale Poitevine and Mot--Mot (Poitou-Charentes region) associations, as well as to all the adult learners attending their literacy programmes who agreed to take part in our study. Our thanks also go to Elizabeth Portier for her translation of the French version of this manuscript and to Marie-Franoise Crt for helping to complete the revised version.


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