Confronting Lexical Choice and Error Distribution in Written French: New Insights into the Linguistic Insecurity of Students with Dyslexia.

Audrey Mazur-Palandre,Agnès Witko,Matthieu Quignard

doi:10.3390/brainsci11070922

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to analyze written texts produced by monolingual French university students, with and without dyslexia. More specifically, we were interested in the linguistic characteristics of the words used during a written production and of the type of word errors. Previous studies showed that students with dyslexia have difficulties in written production, whether in terms of the number of spelling errors, some syntactic aspects, identification of errors, confusion of monosyllabic words, omissions of words in sentences, or utilization of unexpected or inappropriate vocabulary. For this present study, students with dyslexia and control students were asked to produce written and spoken narrative and expository texts. The written texts (N = 86) were collected using Eye and Pen© software with digitizing tablets. Results reveal that students with dyslexia do not censor themselves as regards the choice of words in their written productions. They use the same types of words as the control students. Nevertheless, they make many more errors than the control students on all types of words, regardless of their linguistic characteristics (length, frequency, grammatical classes, etc.). Finally, these quantitative analyses help to target a rather unexpected subset of errors: short words, and in particular determiners and prepositions.

Highlights

There were several steps in these projects: (1) two online questionnaires about difficulties and needs of students with dyslexia at university filled in by 1454 students for the first one and 1472 for the second; (2) a speech, language and neuropsychological assessment (N = 30 students with dyslexia and 30 control students)
Otherwise, when there are too many different discrete values or when variables are continuous, we rely on the distribution quartiles, computed on the texts produced by control students
Does a word with a weak spelling consistency generate more errors? And what about a word with a low frequency? Or a long word? With respect to the previous studies, we hypothesized that students with dyslexia: (1) use less complex words than control students, such as shorter words, words with regular spelling or frequent words (Hypothesis 1, H-1); (2) overall, make more errors than control students, and this is true for all types of words (Hypothesis 2, H-2); and (3) are more sensitive to certain linguistic properties and make more errors on certain types of words, compared to control students (Hypothesis 3, H-3)

Summary

Introduction

Higher education institutions are welcoming an increasing number of students with disabilities, in the United Kingdom [1,2], for instance, or in France [3]. The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation mention that this represents a 12.4% increase in students with disabilities per year, since. 6949 are declared to have speech and language impairments, which represents 20.1% of students with disabilities. This number may hide a much more concerning reality. In 2015 and 2016, two surveys on dyslexia in higher education were conducted at the University of Lyon. For the first questionnaire (2015), two groups of students were selected among the participants, 97 students with dyslexia and 97 control students (matched for gender, age, grade level)

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Discussion

Conclusion