Grapheme coding during sublexical processing in French third and fifth graders

This study aimed to investigate grapheme coding during silent word reading in French developing readers from Grades 3 and 5. Children performed a letter detection task in which three conditions were used; the letter to detect was (a) presented as a single-letter grapheme (simple condition; A in phare), (b) embedded within a multi-letter grapheme that is considered as a unit or not depending on context (weakly cohesive complex condition; A in chant where “an” is a unit but not in other words such as cane), or (c) embedded within a multi-letter grapheme that is systematically considered as a unit (highly cohesive complex condition; A in chaud). Results showed a grapheme condition effect in Grade 5 children only. In this group, both complex grapheme conditions were processed more slowly than the simple condition, but this complexity effect was much stronger for the highly cohesive condition. We suggest that graphemes can be coded as sublexical orthographic units from Grade 5 and that such orthographic fine-grained coding is affected by the degree of grapheme cohesion.