The main goal of this paper is to analyze written texts produced by monolingual French university students, with and without dyslexia. More specifically, we were interested in the linguistic characteristics of the words used during a written production and of the type of word errors. Previous studies showed that students with dyslexia have difficulties in written production, whether in terms of the number of spelling errors, some syntactic aspects, identification of errors, confusion of monosyllabic words, omissions of words in sentences, or utilization of unexpected or inappropriate vocabulary. For this present study, students with dyslexia and control students were asked to produce written and spoken narrative and expository texts. The written texts (N = 86) were collected using Eye and Pen© software with digitizing tablets. Results reveal that students with dyslexia do not censor themselves as regards the choice of words in their written productions. They use the same types of words as the control students. Nevertheless, they make many more errors than the control students on all types of words, regardless of their linguistic characteristics (length, frequency, grammatical classes, etc.). Finally, these quantitative analyses help to target a rather unexpected subset of errors: short words, and in particular determiners and prepositions.

Punctuation strongly contributes to the cohesion of the text. Despite this relevant role in written activity, this linguistic paradigm is too rarely observed. Moreover, it is all the more important to analyze its management as it is one of the difficulties declared by students with dyslexia. In that sense, the purpose of this paper is to analyze punctuation management during written text production by students with dyslexia, compared to matched control students. Previous English and Dutch studies confirm this feeling and reveal that students with dyslexia make many punctuation errors. That being said, there is no consensus; other studies do not reach this conclusion. For this present study, students with dyslexia and control students matched in age, university level, and gender were asked to produce spontaneous written and spoken narrative and expository texts. The written texts (N = 86) were collected using Eye and Pen© software with digitizing tablets. Results reveal that if students with dyslexia use the same inventory of punctuation marks as control students, they use fewer punctuation marks and make more errors than control students. These results are discussed and highlighted by the literature dealing with written production as a complex cognitive activity. They reveal that punctuation management is deficient for students with dyslexia, suggesting that the cohesion system can be impacted by dyslexia.

Nous étudions le rapport qu’entretiennent les chaînes de référence avec la structure textuelle des trois premiers chapitres des Essais sur la peinture de Diderot. Le corpus est issu du projet ANR DEMOCRAT au sein duquel il a été préparé et annoté. Dans une première partie, nous analysons la distribution des chaînes au sein des unités structurelles (chapitres et paragraphes), afin d’observer leur variabilité en termes de longueur et de couverture (densité référentielle et empan). Dans une seconde partie, nous nous intéressons plus précisément au rapport qu’on peut établir entre les chaînes et le thème développé dans les unités structurelles. Les analyses quantitatives multi-niveaux menées à l’aide de l’extension « Annotation URS » du logiciel TXM indiquent que les chaînes de référence jouent un rôle dans le marquage de la continuité et de la discontinuité textuelle. Le thème des chapitres est plutôt associé aux chaînes longues, tandis que le thème des paragraphes s’exprime par des chaînes courtes et souvent discontinues par rapport à celles des autres paragraphes (nouvelles et spécifiques au paragraphe d’occurrence).

In a computer-mediated interaction, when participants are not physically copresent, certain resources are no longer available for interaction while others appear, according to the affordances of the technological environment. In this study, we investigate one particular digital tool, the cursor, in the context of a shared interface where cursor movements are visible to one co-participant. We show that the cursor is not only used to “interact” with the digital environment (via clicks) but that cursor movements, which cannot be interpreted by the machine, are oriented towards the co-participants and may have interactional functions. We describe three different kinds of these movements (straight pointing movement, swaying/circling movement and “moving away”) which, depending on who is doing them and in which sequential position they occur, contribute to the sequential organization of the interaction: as a display of attention, as a device for turn-holding/turn-claiming/leaving the floor or as a particular resource in argumentation. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->

Dyslexia–dysorthographia is a neurodevelopmental disorder in which the symptoms appear during the person’s development (generally around the age of 7 or 8) and persist throughout life. The study of this written language disorder mainly focuses on children, principally in the clinical, cognitive science and neuroscience fields. The importance and originality of this study are that it investigates the impact of dyslexia–dysorthographia on written production in young adults (students) with dyslexia, from a psycholinguistic perspective. To do this, students and matched-control individuals were asked to produce written texts on the same theme. These productions were then analysed, observing on-line indicators, such as pause location and duration. The current investigation found that students with dyslexia still have important difficulties with writing and their lack of automation in spelling has consequences on the transcription and planning process: although they have the same handwriting speed, pressure and word rate as control students, they make longer pauses before words, especially before short and long words, words involving grammatical inflexion, grammatical words and punctuation.