Visual–verbal paired-associate learning: An investigation of the role of verbal and crossmodal associative learning in reading skills in French first- and second-grade children.
Résumé
Visual-verbal paired associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading
acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and
strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted
in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the
strongest cognitive and linguistic predictors of reading acquisition. Critically, PAL is a
complex task involving different components, and there is still no consensus on which is
more involved, crossmodal associative learning or verbal learning, although the latter has
received much support in the literature. The first aim of this study was to test the unique
contribution of PAL in French, which has an intermediate level of orthographic transparency
compared to other languages. The second aim of this study was to disentangle the
mechanisms that account for this relationship. A battery of reading and reading-related tests
as well as a visual-verbal PAL task were administered to 227 French children in first and
second grade. The results showed that PAL makes a unique contribution to word reading in
French, but not to nonword reading scores, over and above the strongest language predictors
of reading: phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming, short-term phonological
memory, vocabulary and age. Our data do not support the putative involvement of the crossmodal associative learning mechanism. We therefore suggest that verbal learning explains the entire contribution of PAL.