Reading and related skills in Grades 6, 7, 8 and 9: French normative data from EVALEC

Introduction.To correctly assess reading difficulties, tests designed according to an appropriate theoretical framework and based on normative data are required. Objective. We thus used EVALEC (Sprenger-Charolles et al., 2005) to collect data on the word-level reading skills and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term memory, and rapid naming) of middle school children (Grades 6 to 9, about 80 children for each grade).Method. In the tests focused on word-level reading skills, the effects of regularity (regular vs. irregular words), lexicality, and length (short vs. long irregular words compared to short vs. long pseudowords) were examined. Results. For all the tests, accuracy and processing times were recorded. The effects of both regularity and lexicality were significant, whatever the measure and independently of grade. Both accuracy and speed were lower for longer pseudowords, whereas length did not have a significant effect on irregular word latencies and, surprisingly, long irregular words were read more accurately than short ones. Reading level assessed by a standardized test (Lefavrais, 2005) was not predicted by phonological short-term memory; rapid naming (of color names) and phonemic awareness were both predictors but, in both cases, only when response times from these tasks were analyzed. Conclusion. These results, and particularly those from the reading tasks, are discussed in relation to models of written word recognition developed to account for the reading of multisyllabic items (Perry et al., 2010) in orthographies shallower than that of English (Perry et al., 2014).