Emotional experience and rate of decoding skills with kindergarten: Effect of multimodal integration of letters

Purpose. Reading acquisition is among the more important and difficult learning that children must achieved. According to the self-teaching hypothesis, this acquisition relies on phonological recoding (grapho-phonological correspondences (GPC)), which allows the construction of an autonomous orthographic lexicon (Share, 1999). Moreover, this learning of GPC could be facilitated by motor experience of letter shape (e.g., Labat, Vallet, Magnan & Ecalle, 2015). It is also known that positive valence of words improves their future recognition and recall with elementary children (Monnier & Syssau, 2008). The present study focused on the impact of emotional words presentation on integration of its GPC. Method. We propose to compare the effect of sensorimotor trainings (visual vs. visuo-motor experience) and emotional material (positive vs. neutral) on word identification in 5-year-old children (N=40, on-going project). A procedure pre-test/ training (4 sessions, 1 session per day, 25 min per session, 2 GPC per session) /post-test is used. Tasks at the pre- and post-tests are the same: GPC judgment and pseudo-word decoding. Trainings differed on sensorimotor experience and emotional valence of words including the GPC in the initial position. Results. We expect the following pattern of improvement: motor experience and positive valence > motor experience and neutral valence > visual experience and positive valence > visual experience and neutral words (Activation-Integration model, Versace, Vallet, Riou, Lesourd, Labeye, & Brunel, 2014). Conclusions. Such findings would offer obvious practical implications in the educational and rehabilitation areas and would contribute to better understand the integrative factors on multimodal letter knowledge and reading acquisition of children.