Manulex infra distributional characteristics of grapheme phoneme mappings and infralexical and lexical units in child directed written material

It is well known that the statistical characteristics of a language, such as word frequency or the consistency of the relationships between orthography and phonology, influence literacy acquisition. Accordingly, linguistic databases play a central role by compiling quantitative and objective estimates about the principal variables that affect reading and writing acquisition. We describe a new set of Web-accessible databases of French orthography whose main characteristic is that they are based on frequency analyses of words occurring in reading books used in the elementary school grades. Quantitative estimates were made for several infralexical variables (syllable, grapheme-to-phoneme mappings, bigrams) and lexical variables (lexical neighborhood, homophony and homography). These analyses should permit quantitative descriptions of the written language in beginning readers, the manipulation and control of variables based on objective data in empirical studies, and the development of instructional methods in keeping with the distributional characteristics of the orthography.