Sensitivity to Graphotactic Regularities in Elementary School: Development and Contributing Variables

Graphotactic regularities are statistical regularities governing orthographic systems that children are sensitive to from the start of their literacy learning. The current study observed changes in children's sensitivity to a set of graphotactic patterns across different grades in elementary school and measured the contribution of skills such as expressive spelling, reading fluency, nonverbal reasoning, and receptive vocabulary to children's sensitivity of these graphotactic regularities.

One thousand one hundred one French-speaking children in Grades 1-5 completed a writing under a dictation task, a text reading fluency task, and a pseudo-orthographic choice task involving different graphotactic regularities. These regularities fell into two categories: legal versus illegal, which defines the legality of letter strings in French, and frequent versus less frequent, which refers to acceptable letter strings that vary in frequency of occurrence either at the beginning or end of a word.

The results of a repeated-measures analysis of variance showed a developmental difference between graphotactic regularity categories. The frequent versus infrequent patterns developed faster than the legal versus illegal patterns until reaching a point of equivalence in Grade 3. At Grades 4 and 5, legal versus illegal graphotactic regularities progressed more quickly while frequent versus less frequent regularities progressed more slowly. Furthermore, generalized linear mixed-model analyses for both types of graphotactic regularities revealed that they were affected by grade, expressive spelling, reading fluency level, and nonverbal reasoning.

This study provides evidence of developmental differences in sensitivity to graphotactic regularities according to the type of regularity studied. Reading fluency and expressive spelling skills contribute to graphotactic regularity sensitivity. Higher scores in expressive spelling, reading fluency, nonverbal reasoning, and an older age were related to higher skills in identifying legal versus illegal graphotactic regularities. Such findings can contribute to educational, clinical, and research applications.