This article investigates the ways children begin spelling from the start of grade 1 to the end of grade 2 in France. It presents the results of a longitudinal study with 676 children faced to the complexity of French orthography and asked to write words and sentences. The corpus was analysed with regard to phonogrammic and morphogrammic principles at work in the French orthography.

Based on the literature and the specific features of the French writing system, we hypothesized that both skill types would develop as early as Grade 1 of elementary school, with lexical spelling skills developing more rapidly. The findings suggest that the development of the phonogrammic, lexical morphogrammic, and grammatical skills of pupils may take into account different variables: consistency, frequency, syntactic context within which words are used, words that can feature different morphograms or not.

This study investigates the reading of novel morpho-syntactic forms, specifically gender-inclusive writing in French. Inclusive writing aims to address the generic use of the masculine form, which often encourages male mental representations over female or non-binary ones. The study focuses on contracted forms using the mid-dot, such as étudiant·e·s, which have become widespread in French despite ongoing public debate. Four experiments using eye-tracking and self-paced reading methods compared reading times for inclusive, masculine, and feminine forms. Experiment 1 found no robust difference in reading times between inclusive forms ending in “·e” and their feminine counterparts, suggesting familiarity with this form. Experiment 2 showed that inclusive forms ending in “·ne”, such as comédien·ne·s, were read more slowly than their feminine counterparts, possibly due to phonological effects. Experiment 3 tested highly pronounceable inclusive forms like auteur·rice·s, which were read more slowly initially, but this effect was short-lasting. Experiment 4 compared more or less pronounceable forms, such as chanteur·euse·s and chanteur·se·s, respectively, confirming that the degree of pronounceability affects reading times. Overall, the study concluded that the reading time for contracted inclusive forms depends on familiarity and the degree of pronounceability.