Liens entre les habiletés rythmiques et les compétences de décodage en lecture : associer les périodicités oculaires au chunking perceptif en parole lue
Numerous studies have documented links between abilities in tasks involving rhythm and some basic reading skills. For instance, significant correlations are observed between children or adolescent’s reading skills and their performance on tasks on motor synchronization to an auditory cadence or rhythmic sequence. Moreover, it is known that dyslexia is often accompanied by difficulties at the rhythmic level, and recent studies in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) have suggested that these deficits may result from atypical patterns of activity in low-frequency neuronal oscillations of the central nervous system. How can these developmental links between rhythm and reading be explained? In some studies, phonological awareness is used to understand this association, hence proposing an indirect explanation relying on a third variable to make sense of the phenomenon. Unlike these theories, the present work proposes a more direct explanation of the link between rhythm and reading, where the emphasis is put on the intrinsic role of rhythm for the perceptual chunking of verbal information in oral or silent reading. To test this hypothesis, an experiment is presented in which 43 participants had to read sentences orally while their voice and eye-movements were recorded by an eye-tracking system. Results show that the implicit rhythm of the text is strictly followed in the participants’ oral reading, independently of a rhythmic priming that was presented before the text. In addition, probabilistic measures of eye fixations resemble the voice’s rhythmic chunks, highlighting possible rhythmic properties of visual sampling for text reading. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for theories of reading.
chunking oscillations rhythm reading eye-tracking