Motor skills and multi-sensory integration : learning grapho-phonemic representations

In our daily lives, we are surrounded by audiovisual associations: we perceive and memorize them throughout our lives. However, the mechanisms involved in their learning are not fully understood. In particular, factors such as motor skills that promote such learning are rarely studied from a memory point of view.Thus, the general objectives of this thesis are to: i) study the cognitive mechanisms underlying the learning of audio-visual associations, ii) better understand the impact of motor skills on the effectiveness of its mechanisms, and iii) propose original methodologies likely to increase the effectiveness of these mechanisms and/or compensate for possible deficits.More precisely, this thesis work focuses on the benefit of motor exploration in learning grapho-phonemic correspondences (GPC). In addition to the purely theoretical interest in studying this learning, the importance of this acquisition for young pre-readers adds a practical and pedagogical dimension to this work. What stands out from this thesis is that two areas of study, the one of learning to read and the one of memory are combined. Though both of them deal with learning hence memory, there has never been a real attempt to apply memory models to help understand the mechanisms of learning word reading and writing, and conversely, memory research has rarely looked to research on learning to read and write to validate their assumptions. However, one of the interests of the Act-In model used to support this thesis is precisely to propose an integrated approach to cognitive functioning and not only to memory.