Biography

At the beginning of my career as a teacher, I worked in the village of Meaulne (middle of France). As a teacher, my aim was to improve the knowledge of my students (around 25 and 30 per school year) about facts (e.g., historical dates, geographical facts), procedures (e.g., addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with carrying; subject-verb agreement), concepts (e.g., pro- portions, fractions), problem solving (e.g., arithmetic problems some of which were very complicated), and composing (e.g., narrative and descriptive texts). I did realized that the students did not progress as much as I had expected, especially in composing and problem-solving. My strategy was to go to the nearby university, first in Clermont (1971-1974), then in Bordeaux (1974-1976 ; first dissertation defense on syntax acquisition, 1976), to seek out efficient interventions to help children improve their composing and problem solving skills. I was recruited in 1977 by the Scientific University of Montpellier where I worked mainly on learning science and mathematics. In parallel, I was preparing my second dissertation on narrative production, the defense of which took place in Bordeaux in March 1981. I was then recruited to the University of Burgundy (Dijon). I immediately started to work on a new lab devoted to learning and development (1984).
I was mainly interested in two topics: math and literacy mostly written composition. For written composition, I planned two complementary research lines. One line was devoted to studying how text composition is acquired by children from 6 to 11 years of age and how it could be improved . Another line, much more ambitious and still in progress, aimed at studying the online characteristics of written language production.
I began by studying the production of written (primarily narrative) texts, focusing on dimensions specific both to the text and to the written modality. Several major themes were addressed, initially using an offline approach (corpus analysis and experiments): the acquisition and implementation of connectives and punctuation marks and verbal forms of the past (Bonnotte & Fayol, 1997; Bourdin & Fayol, 1994; Costermans & Fayol, 1997; Fayol et al., 1993).
From 1990, I implemented two series of investigations. The first one was devoted to studying in detail each of the theoretical components of composing: graphic transcription and its impact on composing; writing words; and producing morpho- syntactic dimensions. The second one had to do with a new and risky topic: the study of online processing in composing. Bourdin and I reasoned that all the language components and processes (e.g., accessing words, fram-ing sentences, and connecting words through agreement processes) as well as the modality specific processes (oral vs. written) draw on a single attentional and memory pool that has limited capacity. That is, we were proposing a capacity theory of writing (Fayol, 1999). Whatever the component (e.g. graphic transcription, agreements), increasing the difficulty to deal with it entails increasing the management load, hence decreasing the resources available to the other components, even in adults (Bourdin & Fayol, 2002; Bressoux et al., 2023; Fayol et al., 1994; Largy & Fayol, 1996). The French orthographic system is very complicated (Berninger & Fayol, 2008; Jaffré & Fayol, 2005 for an extensive review; Morin etv al., 2018) and difficult both to learn and to manage, even in adults (Fayol et al., 1999; Pacton et al., 2001, 2005). Especially difficult is the management of inflectional morphology, more specifically the agreement of nouns and verbs (Cousin & al., 2002; Fayol et al., 2006; Weth et al., 2021). The written French orthography has also an incomplete one-to-one mapping between phonemes and graphemes; managing the system in the phoneme- to-grapheme direction is thus very difficult (Fayol et al., 2009). Many phonemes can be spelled in more than one way (Lété et al., 2008). Consequently, in order to spell correctly, French children and adults must acquire and deploy both lexical knowledge of specific word forms and general orthographic knowledge about sublexical graphotactic regularities (sequences of letters frequently co-occurring) (Pacton et al., 2001, 2005, 2014a, 2014b).
Regarding the online processing of written production, at any moment during composing, people must deal with the management of the different processes in order to produce a coherent and cohesive message adapted to the audience. The successful production of the message depends on both the cost of the processes mobilized by the different components and the ability to manage (or orchestrate) the allocation of resources to these different processes (Fayol, 1999, 2012, 2014). Thus, the latencies and the writing rates of the written production of isolated words are sensitive to both the frequency and consistency and regularity of these words (Bonin et al., 1998, Bonin & Fayol, 2000; Bonin et al., 2002; Kandel et al., 2009). Data provided evidence that the more complex the unit—word, words, phrases, clauses, sentences—the more the time costs to plan the longer initial pause. However, every dimension was not planned from the start, as illustrated by the production of pairs of words. Only some dimensions were totally prepared when transcription began (Bonin et al., 2005; Maggio et al., 2012).

Selected Publications:

   Fayol, M., Alamargot, D., & Berninger, V. (2012). Translation of thoughts to written text while composing: Advancing theory, knowledge, methods, and applications. New York : Psychology Press. 
   Perfetti, C. Rieben, L & Fayol, M. (1997). Learning to spell. Hillsdale, NJ : Laurence Erlbaum. 
   Costermans, & Fayol, M. (Eds.), (1997). Processing interclausal retionships. Studies in the production and comprehension of text. Mahwah, NJ : Laurence Erlbaum Ass. Inc. 
   Abbott, R. D., Berninger, V. W., & Fayol, M. (2010). Longitudinal relationships of levels of language in writing and between writing and reading in grades 1 to 7. Journal of educational psychology, 102(2), 281.
   Bourdin, B., & Fayol, M. (1994). Is written language production more difficult than oral language production? A working memory approach. International journal of psychology, 29(5), 591-620. 
   Fayol, M., Barrouillet, P., & Marinthe, C. (1998). Predicting arithmetical achievement from neuro-psychological performance: A longitudinal study. Cognition, 68(2), B63-B70.
   Fayol, M., Largy, P., & Lemaire, P. (1994). Cognitive overload and orthographic errors: When cognitive overload enhances subject–verb agreement errors. A study in French written language. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47(2), 437-464.
   Fayol, M., Hickmann, M., Bonnotte, I. et al. (1993) The effects of narrative context on French verbal inflections: A developmental perspective. J Psycholinguist Res 22, 453–478.
   Fayol, M., Largy, P. & Lemaire, P. (1994). Subject- verb agreeement errors in French. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 47A, 437-464. 
   Fayol, M., Totereau, C. & Barrouillet, P. (2006). Disentangling the impact of semantic and formal factors in the acquisition of number inflections. Noun, adjective and verb agreement in written French. Reading and Writing, 19, 717-736
   Fayol, M., Zorman, M. & Lété, B. (2009). Unexpectedly good spellers too. Associations and dissociations in reading and spelling French. British Journal of Educational Psychology, Monograph series 2 – Teaching and learning writing, 6, 63-75.