Federico Ferretti

Marcella Schmidt

Di Friedberg

N -NATURA/NATURE

Fernand Braudel, in his classic work on the Mediterranean (1949), does not refer to a 'Mediterranean nature'; he refers to peninsulas, mountains, highlands and plains, to sea, climate and cultures, but not to nature.

Coming from a different perspective, Aldous Huxley defines the Mediterranean area in terms of its climate, vegetation, and culture: "The Mediterranean lies on the fringes of this desert belt and the olive is its tree -the tree of a region of sun-lit clarity separating the damps of the equator from the damps of the North. It is the symbol of a classicism enclosed between two romanticisms" (Huxley 1936, 287). Again, for Predrag Matvejevi1 it is difficult to recompose the 'mosaic' that is the Mediterranean; in his breviary he tells of names, seagulls, smells, salt marshes, palm trees, and buoys:

Images of the sea and all that is found along it, its various states, the reflections of sky, sun, and clouds in it, the colors of the sea bed in the depths of the abyss as well as where the water is shallow, the stones, sand, and algae on the sea bottom, the dark and translucent patches along the coast or far out from it, its transitions, the morning sea and the evening sea, the sea of the daytime and the sea of the night-time, everyday and eternal […] everyone feels -or at least this is how it is on the Mediterranean -that they have something to say about the sea and what it looks like and that what they have to say is truly important. (Matvejevi1 1993, 56).

But nature? This term does not appear, perhaps on account of its ambiguity, in either Matvejevi1's breviary or Huxley's essay. The concept of nature -whether understood as other than, or as one with, the human condition -occupies a central place in the geographic debate (

In P. Giaccaria, M. Paradiso (dir.), Mediterranean Lexicon, Rome, Società Geografica Italiana/International Geographic Union, 2012, p. 91-116.

Page 2 1 creating/constructing/modifying the living world [START_REF] Schmidt Di Friedberg | Conservazionismo tra natura e cultura[END_REF]. The issue of how to reach a consensus about what nature is, whether an objective external reality or a cultural construction, is resolved in different ways within physical geography, human geography, and numerous other disciplines: "Human geography is by no means alone in finding itself at an important juncture in its efforts to escape the dialectical vortex of naturesociety relations and the environmental refrain of the 'outside'" (Whatmore 2002, 2). Thus the theme of 'nature' is at the heart of heated interdisciplinary debates, but the term often takes on an overly obvious meaning, synonymous with 'environment', 'planet', 'ecology': "One common definition of nature is that it is the non-human world. According to this definition, the word 'nature' is more or less synonymous with the word 'environment'. […] But […] nature means 'the essence of something' as well. Using this second, broader definition we see that nature also encompasses humans too" (Castree 2005, 8). In his account of the history of geography starting precisely from the ancient world of the Mediterranean, Clarence Glacken observes that words in common use, such as 'nature' but also 'physical environment', 'design', 'final causes', 'climate', etc. often appear to be self-explanatory and not to require further definition; yet they are the product of a slow and complex historical evolution during which they have acquired several different -and frequently vague -superimposed meanings:

[t]he word 'nature', as everyone knows, has many meanings in Greek and Latin and in modern languages.

With all of its failings it is a grand old word.

[…] When Marsh wrote Man and Nature in 1864 he described the earth as modified by human action. Sometimes the word is synonymous with the physical or natural environment; sometimes it has a more philosophic, religious, theological aura than those more matter-of-fact terms express. Occasionally, it attains grandeur as in Buffon's reference to it as 'the exterior throne of Divine magnificence'" (Glacken 1967, XIV).

The interpretation of natural as contrasting with human, within an anthropocentric perspective, while already featuring in the Greco-Roman view of the world, is at the very center of the Judaic-Christian tradition. The latter is charged with having set off humankind's indiscriminate exploitation of nature based on the belief that "man and nature are two things, and man is master" [START_REF] White | The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis[END_REF](White , 1205)).

Underpinning the 'environmental despotism' of the Bible is the imperative: "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground." (Genesis 1: 28). According to White, this interpretation of nature -which began to take a strong hold within Christianity 1 during the Middle Ages -has given rise to contemporary science and technology as well as to the current environmental crisis; furthermore, the destruction of animist paganism and its genii loci has fostered indifference towards other living beings, reducing them to the status of mere consumer objects. Thus modern technology is seen as the intentional putting into practice of the Christian notion of rightful human dominion over nature, on the basis that humanity transcends nature because it is created in the image and likeness of God. White concludes: "Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man" [START_REF] White | The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis[END_REF](White , 1207)).

However, remaining within the Christian-anthropocentric perspective, the Mediterranean landscape is also linked to a different interpretation of nature, understood as a "garden to work and take care of" and not to exploit, a key theme within environmental ethics. God has conferred dominion over nature to the just and faithful, while transgressors will be punished with every kind of environmental catastrophe. The focus is on looking back to the Earthly Paradise, to the golden age in which creation was still unspoiled and the air and water uncontaminated.

Nature thus becomes, as proposed by Kay, an instrument of justice: a beautiful landscape (the Promised Land) is a divine reward. This attitude seems to have carried over into some contemporary environmental catastrophe theories. The creation of pollution is an immoral act, punished by respiratory illnesses, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, desertification, mass extinction, the exhaustion of resources, and even the spread of AIDS [START_REF] Kay | Human Dominion over nature in the Hebrew Bible[END_REF]). The present day increase of catastrophic events in the Mediterranean world, attributed to climate change (flooding, landslides, drought), lends fresh interest to the notion of human 'transgression' in terms of ignoring the 'laws' of nature.

To uncover the ambiguity of 'nature' as a concept, it suffices to attempt to define it.

Humboldt, in his Kosmos, declares: "Nature is a unity in diversity of phenomena; harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar with regard to form, attributes and the forces animating them, into one great Whole, penetrated by the breath of life" (Humboldt 1845, 5-6). However Humboldt's extraordinary insight regarding a harmonious unity of nature becomes problematic when one seeks to analyze and interpret the components of such a united whole. An apparently impossible task; Torsten Haegerstrand wonders with dismay:

"How can any sane person dare to confess a hope that he can say something about how to view Nature as wholeness?" (Haegerstrand 1976, 329).

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Finally, Raymond Williams considers that "Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language", distinguishing between three different areas of meaning: (i) the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including or not including human beings (Williams 1983, 208). Williams' analysis regards human history, but its geographic positioning cannot be overlooked [START_REF] Ginn | Nature: A Contested Concept[END_REF]; the shores of the Mediterranean, since ancient times, have been stage to the enquiry into the meaning of such an important term, a keystone of Western geographical thinking: "As well as changing over time, concepts of nature […] also vary from place to place. Within the discipline of Geography, conceptions of nature are closely wrapped up with different ideas about the nature of Geography as a science and subject of study. For both those reasons nature is perhaps the most important concept in Geography" (Ginn and Demeritt 2009, 308). At this point we cannot but retrace the historic development of geographic thought in order to clarify the terms of the debate in the Mediterranean context. For Castree:

Geography is one of several subjects devoted to the study of natural phenomena. Nature is not, of course, the only thing that geographers study. But it's long been recognized as a major disciplinary preoccupation.

[…] The 'geographical experiment' consisted of trying to bring society and nature 'under the one conceptual umbrella' (Castree 2005, 10).

Nature and geography in the thinking of the ancient Greeks

The birth of European geographic thought is generally held to have taken place on the shores of the Aegean Sea. While the first geographical map of the known world is attributed to Anaximander of Miletus, a scholar from the 5th century B.C., the ancient Greeks themselves considered the mythical Homer to be the first writer of geographical tales. As stated by Strabo, geography was essentially born as a philosophical science with most of the leading geographers of the ancient world defined as andres philosophoi (Strabo, Geographia, I, I, 1). Eratosthenes' map, as has already been noted by Germaine Aujac (Aujac 2001, 111). The innovative aspect of Strabo's contribution was his 'invention' of a geography which was not limited to drawing maps and measuring astronomical differences but had as its primary focus the study of the peoples inhabiting the different regions of the world in terms of their diverse cultural and political characteristics. The relationship between humanity and nature, in this perspective, helps to explain history, because the harmonious relationship that develops between a given region and its inhabitants, known as pronoia, means that the layout of mountains, seas, and rivers is not arbitrary but corresponds to a design; the role of the geographer is to interpret and understand the links between this pattern and human society. The idea of nature in classical geography (end 18th -beginning 20 th century)

In the Age of Enlightenment the concept of nature was pivotal to all branches of thought. This was particularly true of philosophy, due to its links with the rational sciences, which Enlightenment thinkers saw as gradually piercing the darkness of superstition and ignorance.

In France, between the 17th and 18th centuries, thinkers such as Montesquieu and Bodin considered nature to be the key to understanding the various peoples of the earth. They believed that the environmental and climatic conditions of a place strongly influence the character of the peoples that live there. This was due to the principle of so-called 'geographical influences', a trend that went down in history as 'environmental determinism' 1 (Febvre 1981, 4-20). At that time, European geographers were becoming increasingly interested in natural systems and the laws governing them; in the mid 1700s the Frenchman Philippe Buache developed a theory of river basins that was to remain popular until the first decades of the following century, when his lack of mechanistic understanding became apparent [START_REF] Broc | La géographie des philosophes : géographes et voyageurs français au XVIII siècle[END_REF].

It was in German-speaking scientific circles that applying the study of nature to geography became important to defining the discipline. Polycarp Leyser's essay on a 'true geographical method', published in 1726 in Helmstedt, is considered the first real affirmation of the 'geography of natural regions', which Franco Farinelli has seen as an implicit political strategy of opposition to what, in the absolutist German states of the time, were called

Staatsgeographen. In brief, this idea "was effectively the only possible form of political criticism not within geography, but through geography" (Farinelli 1992, 113).

According to this interpretation, acknowledging that geography was entitled to represent the world as divided into natural regions meant acknowledging that science was entitled to ignore any obligation to represent state boundaries as defined by the principles of the geography of states and marked on its main tool, that is to say, geographical maps. We are referring to Élisée Reclus (1830Reclus ( -1905)), who, at the end of his career, invented a motto that aptly summarizes the aforementioned Ritterian 'dualism', writing in the exergue of his latest work, L'Homme et la Terre, that "man is nature that becomes aware of itself" (Reclus 1905, 1). This future anarchist geographer also shared with Ritter the rediscovery of classical authors such as Strabo and Herodotus. The latter, incomparably superior to those specialists of our day -who in order to adhere to who knows what official programs, have turned geography into an object of disgust and derision -successfully made it more attractive than poetry itself, because he did not separate man from nature or customs nor institutions from the environment in which they developed (Reclus 1872, 1).

Nature was central to the educational ideas of geographical anarchists such as Reclus and his colleague and friend Pëtr Aleksejevi1 Kropotkin (1842Kropotkin ( -1921)); in their political criticism of authoritarian teaching methods, they even suggested teaching geography in the open air in order to stimulate the students' independent powers of observation, starting from primary school. This strategy was mainly inspired by the experience of the Yverdon school, directed by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827), the Swiss educationalist whose strong influence on the 'fathers' of modern geography has long been noted (Guillaume 1890, 223 [START_REF] Ferretti | Il mondo senza la mappa: Élisée Reclus e i geografi anarchici[END_REF].

The enquiry into nature originated in fact in the natural sciences, which since the 18th century had been dealing with mechanical systems that had no need of divine intervention. Nature became an alternative to religion, dealing with earthly materiality rather than metaphysics;

this too explains the interest in material sciences and the 'love of nature' expressed by authors such as Reclus even at the end of the 19th century.

Furthermore, Kropotkin clearly likens the evolution of science to that of revolutionary thinking in his century. Whereas numerous evolutionists of the time refused to accept a methodological parallel between biology and social sciences, Kropotkin proposed applying 'naturalistic' methods to society. By this he meant that evolutionism should no longer be seen as competing with the so-called Social Darwinists, but rather as demonstrating that the key evolutionary feature is mutual aid, which the Russian geographer had in fact started to study, initially between animals and plants, then in the context of human history:

Anarchy is a conception of the Universe, based on the mechanical interpretation of phenomena, which embraces the whole of nature, not excluding the life of societies. Its method is that of the natural sciences, and according to this method every scientific conclusion must be verified (Kropotkin 1924, 56).

This idea clashes with the classic concept of the Hobbesian 'state of nature', according to which, given the natural perversity of the human race, societies not regulated by some form of institutionalized authority will live in a state of war with everyone fighting everyone else; in this view, the only way to avoid full-scale civil conflict is to recognize a sovereign power as holding the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The knock-on effect of the Hobbesian perspective, according to Kropotkin, was that judgments about man in the state of nature were not limited to past eras but were also applied to the so-called 'primitive' or 'savage' peoples:

"the whole philosophy of the 19th century continued to think of primitive peoples as packs of wild Beasts, who lived in small isolated family groups and fought each other over food and females" (Kropotkin 1924, 50). Kropotkin saw this prejudice simply as a legacy of the ideas of original sin or original guilt promoted by the various churches, while the study of primitive societies, which engaged other geographical anarchists and anthropologists such as Léon Metchnikoff (1838-1888) and Élie Reclus (1827Reclus ( -1904)), showed that man in his natural state is not simply a wild beast ready to tear his fellow men to pieces, but rather one who seeks to

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1 develop strategies for adapting to his situation, above all by means of cooperation with his fellows.

Another geographer brought up on Ritter's writings, the German Friedrich Ratzel (1844Ratzel ( -1904)), developed a model based on close interaction between man and nature. His

Anthropogeography is introduced by a Biogeography, i.e. he considers the territorial dynamics that govern the distribution of vegetable and animal species as a preamble to the dynamics of the human race, which indeed are often presented using naturalistic metaphors.

Although Ratzel was a geographer, he had received naturalistic training inspired by the ideas of the Darwinist Ernst Haeckel, inventor of the term 'ecology', and he based his idea of human geography on the discipline's inseparable link with nature. Ratzel himself likened the law of the expansion of peoples to those underlying the expansion of plants. "Nature does not allow a people to remain inert for long; it either has to advance or retreat" (Ratzel 1914, 216).

In classic French geography -the Géographie Humaine school inspired by the work of Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) -natural settings dictated the decisions taken by geographers with regard to regional delineation or découpage; such decisions were pivotal in a field that paid close attention to natural regions; in fact, regional monographs and studies of the pays would be the classic products of Vidal de la Blache's students. But it was obviously difficult to define and delimit such units; in this sense the monograph on the Île-de-France published by Vidal's 'deputy ', Lucien Gallois (1857-1941), is considered emblematic. Here too there was a political implication that consisted of claiming the right for geography to be independent of administrative divisions: "One of the challenges is to discover 'natural' entities that oppose the arbitrariness and the contingencies of administrative divisions, as Vidal de la Blache, Reclus and Gallois like to say" [START_REF] Robic | Note sur la notion d'échelle dans la géographie française de la fin du XIX siècle au début du XX siècle[END_REF]). This approach was to be the norm for the French geographical sciences until well into the mid-1900s and included the revival of concepts such as the valley section, thanks to the work of followers of Vidal de la Blache, such as Jean Brunhes . In France, this concept would also foster the spread of the image of a 'section' or 'crosssection' as a natural metaphor in the social sciences [START_REF] Robic | Le val comme laboratoire de géographie humaine ? Les avatars du Val d'Anniviers[END_REF].

Another development of this idea is the acceptance of the Mediterranean basin as an entity with its own natural and human constants; while the influence of post-Vidalians such as Jules One could, however, hypothesize that Reclus's ideas reached right down to Braudel, also inspiring the other authors referred to" (Deprest 2002, 88).

Nature and culture in the Mediterranean landscape

The Mediterranean then became a focus of interest for that group of geographers who, after the well-known works of Marc Bloch and Roger Dion, produced a sizeable body of writings on rural landscapes between the forties and sixties. In Italy, this same current inspired numerous contemporary works by people such as Lucio Gambi and Emilio Sereni [START_REF] Ferretti | Emilio Sereni geografo: il paesaggio mediterraneo tra fuoco, terrazze e giardini[END_REF]). The road had been mapped out, in this sense, by the geographers who "under the impulse imparted by Vidal de la Blache and under the direction of Albert Demangeon especially, described and classified types of landscape in terms of their remote origins" (Juillard et al. 1957, 7). The succeeding generation considered such initial works to be too limited to the central-Northern regions of France, hence their analysis of the more

In P. Giaccaria, M. Paradiso (dir.), Mediterranean Lexicon, Rome, Società Geografica Italiana/International Geographic Union, 2012, p. 91-116.

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Mediterranean aspects of the French landscape. Xavier de Planhol, among others, states that in the South, Dion, Bloch and Roupnel "felt far less at their ease than in the regions of the North and West where distinct sets of open fields and wooded countryside [bocage], despite all their internal nuances, appeared to be more clearly defined" (Juillard et al. 1957, 98).

Interest in Italy also ensued. Jules Sion was one of the geographers who had started to take an interest in the Italian peninsula in the thirties. Author of the chapter on Italy in the Géographie Universelle, he immediately afterwards became interested in the land structures of Southern

France, attributing the historic weakness of the commons to "a fundamentally individualistic spirit" (Juillard et al. 1957, 101). Similarly, De Planhol mentions Maurice Le Lannou's monograph on Sardinia as a "vigorous and remarkable overall interpretation of one of the Mediterranean countrysides" [START_REF] Juillard | Structures agraires et paysages ruraux, un quart de siècle de recherches françaises, publié à l'occasion du colloque international de géographie et d'histoire agraires[END_REF].

De Planhol's essay concludes with a series of considerations on human settlements in the Mediterranean area, which were taken up by Sereni in his paper on the "little village perched on a hill" (Sereni 1961, 88-91); the agricultural structure of Sereni's village features what Demangeon had termed the 'separated field' system. In this scenario, the distance dividing the commercial and residential centers from the agricultural land cannot be explained by economic or environmental factors, but by security problems linked first to the Barbarian invasions and then to piracy. In this sense, for De Planhol, "the concentrated Mediterranean habitat is certainly for the most part an artificial habitat. It is generally associated with both conditions of insecurity and systematic external influences during the colonization of the land" [START_REF] Juillard | Structures agraires et paysages ruraux, un quart de siècle de recherches françaises, publié à l'occasion du colloque international de géographie et d'histoire agraires[END_REF]. Centuries later, visible traces of this historic situation bear out what Sereni called the "law of inertia of the landscape" (Sereni 1961, 88), a notion which clearly seems to have developed from the idea of the 'persistencies' characterizing both the geography of the Vidalians and the history of the Annalistes.

Another aspect of the discussion concerns terracing in the Mediterranean area, which poses various problems: the issue is understanding the historical genesis and the social functions of the various kinds of terraces, tiers, and strips, and distinguishing between them. Jean Despois tried to define a series of physical and human constants in this type of arrangement, such as the availability of slopes accessible to irrigation techniques suitable for the tree-growing methods used on the terraces. In general, this form of agricultural work is linked to periods of demographic excess, since "it is always painful and not simple to carry out. Furthermore, it seems to only exist in those regions in which the demographic pressure has remained such that the small farmers cannot make do with the plains or the valley bottoms" [START_REF] Despois | Pour une étude de la culture en terrasses dans les pays méditerranéens[END_REF] In P. Giaccaria, M. Paradiso (dir.), Mediterranean Lexicon, Rome, Società Geografica Italiana/International Geographic Union, 2012, p. 91-116.

Page 12 1 109). One part of the debate focuses, without reaching any definitive answer, on the issue of the individual or collective nature of these arrangements, a question on which, according to Daniel Faucher, "we have little or no testimony. Observation would suggest to me more the idea of a type of work carried out by individual families than of collective community projects" (Despois 1959, 113).

Turning again to the definition of 'artificiality' in reference to the Mediterranean landscape, it is important to mention slash-and-burn agriculture and the resulting Mediterranean scrublands. The Italian scholar Sereni borrows a term from the literature in French, the Provençal word marrelo meaning "diamond-shaped patches of land, accessible for stubble grazing [that] are emblematic of the agricultural landscape of Mediterranean France and Cisalpine Liguria and strongly in contrast with the more typically 'Gallic' landscape of Central and Northern France" (Sereni 1955, 516). This brings us back to the 'degradation' of the natural landscape in the Mediterranean, mainly attributed to the fires of the 'slash-andburn' technique, in French known as brûlis. Sereni himself in his famous essay Terra nuova e buoi rossi [New Land and Red Oxen] undertakes a geohistorical study of how the Mediterranean scrub has developed due to human intervention by fire. His treatise opens with a Calabrian folk-tale conveying a very simple moral: to renew the fertility of the soil, new land must be seeded, but this new land must be ploughed with red oxen; in other words, fires are used to supply phosphates to the new fields that are taken from the woodlands in a rudimentary form of pluriennal crop rotation. In Sereni's view, the data he reports on recorded fires from as late as the beginning of the 20th century, for the most part deliberately started to clear land for agriculture and grazing, should be sufficient to excite the interest of agrarian historians in techniques such as slash-andburn, and not just in Calabria, were it only on account of their key role in shaping the agrarian landscape of our country, almost up to the present day and quite certainly even more so in the past" (Sereni 1981, 5).

This aspect is critical when evaluating the extent to which a landscape is 'natural' or 'artificial'; today it is taken for granted that in Italy, and in Southern Europe generally, there are no 'natural landscapes' because from ancient times onwards settlements and human work have left their mark, but in the mid-20th century this was still a subject of debate. Sereni also examines the growth of different types of 'Mediterranean scrub', considering even the thick scrub to bear the indirect traces of the passage of fire centuries beforehand, in that different species would have emerged and become dominant during regrowth due to the altered morphological and pedological conditions of the soil. He upholds the principle that the thicker In P. Giaccaria, M. Paradiso (dir.), Mediterranean Lexicon, Rome, Società Geografica Italiana/International Geographic Union, 2012, p. 91-116.

Page 13 1 scrub, or fratta in Italian, is not to be viewed as a primary plant formation but "more frequently as a secondary plant formation", that is to say, the result of a progressive degradation of the primeval Mediterranean forest, due to the expansion and repeated cycles of burning practices by herdsmen and crop-growers, and further accelerated by excessive grazing especially by goats (Sereni 1981, 15). The original Mediterranean forests, dominated by oak woods, were gradually taken over by pinewoods and other species that grew back faster after fires, such as the mastic, the strawberry tree, and other plant species that are more resistant to fire and subsequent grazing. However, Grove and Rackham present an alternative theory to the stereotype of the ruined landscape as a 'lost paradise' destroyed by human activity, contending that natural landscapes across most of the Mediterranean have always been semiarid.

If we are not in favor of attributing a moral value to the notion of 'degradation' advanced by

Sereni and post-Vidalians, it may be said that scholars of human geography have generally not fallen into this trap and that their studies are progressively lending more and more support to the view of the two British geographers: "The Mediterranean is no place for facile generalization" (Grove and Rackham 2001, 12).

Searching for a new language

Thus the Mediterranean mosaic leads us back to the complexity of the term nature and the problems associated with the "tendency in discursive debates to homogenize the category 'nature' (and discuss its social meaning and constitution as a unitary category) when it should be regarded as intensely variegated -an unparalleled field of difference" (Harvey 1996, 183).

The idea of nature, as we have seen, does not so much correspond to a demonstrated truth as to a point of view and a cultural stance. "Nature -writes Donna Haraway -cannot preexist its construction" (Haraway 1992, 296). Nature on the one hand has been transformed into an object of study with its own laws, which we may decipher through the filter of science; on the other hand, as scientific enquiry has progressed, humans have lost their ancient sense of community with the remainder of living beings, while increasingly occupying a position of dominance over them. For the scientist Daniel Botkin, the Western notion of nature is principally based on ancient conceptions of it, which have nothing to do with scientific truth:

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[t]he potential for us to make progress with environmental issues is limited by the basic assumptions that we make about nature, the unspoken, often unrecognized perspective from which we view our environment. […] We have tended to view nature as a Kodachrome still-life, […] but nature is a moving picture show […] continually changing and complex (Botkin 1990, 5-6).

For Kate Soper:

In this sense, nature may be viewed as a register of changing conceptions as to who qualifies, and why, for full membership of the human community, and thus also to some extent as a register of Western civilization's anxieties and divisions about its own qualities, activities, and achievements (Soper 1995, 73-74).

Amongst those who have been considered 'inhuman' or less than human at different junctures of Western history, Soper counts barbarians (i.e. those who do not speak one's own language), slaves, negroes, women, Indians, savages, 'wild men', witches, sorcerers, dwarfs, and idiots. Nature, when stripped of its aesthetic and mysterious qualities and of its sympathy towards human beings, becomes a 'mythical' object, distant from our daily experience and thus progressively banished from our cities -the very heart of our settlements -as well as from the rhythms and calendar of human activity, to end up being relegated to the laboratory and to 'protected areas': "This ontological separation of the natural and the social has, since at least the European Enlightenment, been associated with other dualisms organizing our thoughts, such as rural-urban, country-city, and wilderness-civilization" (Castree 2001, 6).

Nature has been relegated to the margins of scientific discourse, yet we are left with the sensation of having forgotten or lost something of our conception of it, something qualitatively indefinable that has to do with beauty and a sense of connection with human sentiment. To use the words of the poet Emerson:

[t]he greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown (Emerson 1836, 17).

The French historian Serge Moscovici, one of the first to recognize the question naturelle as amongst the fundamental problems of the century, with the potential to mobilize its vital forces, starts from the assumption that scientific progress -rated "amongst the most

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Page 15 1 revolutionary events in human history", comparable to the spread of writing and of languagecontinuously calls for a revision of our conceptions of time and space and the natural laws:

humanity is today, the leading agent of transformation on the planet with regard to climatic, biological, and geomorphological equilibrium as well as energy transformations. However, humankind itself is not immune to the consequences of these transformations but is in turn modified by them; it would seem that the peculiar characteristic of the human race is not so much its rationality or technical ability as its capacity to self-create and to combine itself with other living beings, in short, to generate its own natural state; humanity is not viewed as the product of cosmic energy or of animal or vegetable vitality, but as together both creator and subject of nature. Only in this way, by considering nature both as a given and as a human creation, can we break out of the vicious circle of the irreconcilable contrast humanity-nature:

"Nature, as we know it, has humanity as its distinctive trait: that in fact is its nature" (Moscovici 1977, 32). Moscovici's work became a cult book for the French green movement from the 1970s; since then he has continued to explore environmental themes, recently focusing on the Weberian concept of the 'disenchantment of the world' caused by the scientific vision at the heart of industrial and technological civilization. For Moscovici, one of the key tasks of the contemporary environmental movement is to 'reenchant' the world; this does not imply a return to magic or to the religion of miracles, but a newly invented nature:

Re-enchanting the world is not a cult but a practice of nature. It is not brought about by remedying the malaise associated with our way of life, but by trying out new ways of bringing into being a new way of life (Moscovici 2001, 140).

Conclusion: a challenge for the geographical discipline

This historical and philosophical excursus illustrates how analysis of the interaction between humanity and nature has been part of human thinking since antiquity and how the Mediterranean has always been a key laboratory for this line of analysis. Furthermore, although geography may not today enjoy the highest profile as a discipline, it has contributed to thinking in this area throughout the enquiry to date, offering original elaborations that have influenced the other human sciences, such as the case of the history of Annales and Fernand Braudel in the 20th century: "However, in a world of genetic engineering and global warming, geographers are increasingly skeptical of even using 'natural' and 'social' as categories of analysis" (Ginn and Demeritt 2009, 307). Although in recent decades -in line

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1 with the development of critical thinking in geography -the idea of nature has taken on a social dimension, drawing on Marxist, post-Marxist, feminist, anti-racist, poststructuralist, post-colonial, and actor-network-theory-inspired interpretations, it has not lost any of its ambiguity (Castree 2001). Demeritt ponders:

After all, 'nature' is frequently taken to mean the totality of everything that is not humanly constructed. In what sense can the land we see or the water we drink be called 'constructions'? And yet, an increasing number of human geographers now insist just this: that 'nature' is a social construction" (Demeritt 2001, 22).

Today, the profound question of 'what is nature' has transcended both the boundaries of the Mediterranean and disciplinary barriers to take its place as a 'contested concept' at the heart of international and interdisciplinary critical enquiry. In the words of Philippe Descola: "All was untamed -it goes without saying -that which issued from the silva, the great European forest that Roman colonization was little by little to nibble away […] everything conspired to classify humans and nonhumans under one and the same register of hierarchical subordination of which the relationships within the extended family represent the complete model. Along

with the terminology expressing it, the Romans bequeathed us the values associated with this antithetical pair whose fortunes were to grow ever brighter. For the discovery of other forests, at other latitudes, was to enrich the initial dichotomy without altering its fields of signification" (Descola 2004, 29-30).

Ecology and physical geography are often inclined to draw back from such a key theme in favor of dissecting it into its environmental, morphological, climatic, fauna, and vegetation components, expressed in terms of flows and quantitative data. Nonetheless, "Ideas about nature are as important as the realities they purport to describe and explain.

[…] Our experience of nature is rarely direct. Rather, it is thoroughly mediated for us.

[…] ideas about nature have a materiality every bit as real as the living and inanimate things those ideas represent" [START_REF] Castree | Nature[END_REF]. It is important that human geography, currently called to address increasingly critical global environmental issues, should renew its awareness of its own roots as a modern science in the tradition of Humboldt, Ritter, Reclus, etc., maintaining the capacity to elaborate its own independent view of the world and to offer original solutions, not only for the problems of science but also for those of politics, culture, and society.

For

  example, Strabo himself was the first to develop the principle of the highly indented nature of the Mediterranean coastline -to become popular during the 19th and 20th centuries -which attributes the flourishing of European civilization to the variety of its forms and the indentation into the land by the sea. Similarly, at the time of the Roman Empire -albeit in the Hellenistic cultural context of 2nd century Alexandria of Egypt -the famous Claudius Ptolemy continued Eratosthenes' work and laid the base for the rediscovery of geographical knowledge in the modern era.

  At the beginning of the 19th century, this tradition of critical geography came up against the concept of nature typical of the Romantic age. On his return from a 5-year voyage (1799-1804) to the equinoctial regions of the New World, Alexander von Humboldt proposed publishing the more popular parts of his travelogues in the form of Aspects of Nature (Ansichten von Natur -Tableaux de la Nature), thereby introducing European readers to the luxuriant tropical vegetation and spectacular mountain ranges of central and South America.Prompted by Oken and Schelling's Naturphilosophie, the other 'leading light' of German geography in the first half of the 19th century, Carl Ritter, developed his idea of geography as the study of the binary dialectic between man and nature. For Ritter, the dynamics between the two terms was constantly evolving, with each remaining essential and consubstantial to the other as in Ionic philosophy. From a practical point of view, this translates into a geographical discipline steeped in the historical, that is to say human, element, as Ritter explained in 1836 in a letter to the then president of the Paris Geographical Society, Baron Pelet. "Although I have no plans to make great discoveries on the surface of the Earth, my research does involve walking step by step, if not to all corners of the Globe, at least all round the Ancient World, in order to compare what nature has bestowed with what history has done and what geographical science still has to do to rank as a discipline alongside History and 1 Philosophy." 1 One of the most celebrated European geographers of the second half of the 19th century, a student of Ritter's in Berlin, explicitly took inspiration from Humboldt for his first monograph, entitled Voyage à la Sierra Nevada de Sainte-Marthe, paysages de la nature tropicale.

1

  Sion and Albert Demangeon on the construction of 'Mediterranean' expressed by Fernand Braudel is well known, over the last few years further light has been thrown on the more distant geographical roots of that 'invention' of the Mediterranean. The work of Florence In P. Giaccaria, M. Paradiso (dir.), Mediterranean Lexicon, Rome, Società Geografica Italiana/International Geographic Union, 2012, p. 91-116. Page 10 Deprest among others has shown that the Braudelian construction owes much to the French geography of the 19th and 20th centuries, which in turn drew inspiration from studies of nature conducted by botanists around the Mediterranean with a view to identifying the unifying elements of this basin also in terms of human history. According to the French scholar in fact, naturalistic expeditions into Egypt and Syria in the first half of the 19 th century showed that vegetation on the other shores of the Mediterranean was very similar to the species growing on its Northern shores. This contributed to the development of a 'Mediterranean' discourse that had not existed before and the first universal geography volume in French, by Conrad Malte-Brun, was to become its vehicle: "[o]n this subject, an analysis of the expedition materials showed developments starting from the 1830s. But the theme of the natural unity (of the Mediterranean) was already present in the first 'Universal Geography'" (Deprest 2002, 77). By the time of Reclus and the Vidalians, the Mediterranean debate was well under way and, depending on the period, focused on either the unifying function of the sea or on the comparison between the different areas of land and their respective kinds of life. In general, according to Deprest, the fundamental contribution of human geography to the construction of a Mediterranean geo-history is clear: "Although Braudel follows the Vidalian paradigm to the letter, he nonetheless includes the sea as a fundamental element of his object of study […] The Braudelian construction thus presents both inherited and innovative material in relation to the geographical debate of the Vidalians.

National Library of France, Maps and Plans Department, Manuscrits de la Société de Géographie, 4373, 347, lettre de Ch. Ritter à M. le Président de la Société de Géographie, 6 août 1836.


Stéphanie Ducrot
email: sducrot@up.univ-mrs.fr

Bernard Lété

Liliane Sprenger-Charolles

Joël Pynte

Catherine Billard

Running head: OVP EFFECT IN BEGINNING AND DYSLEXIC READERS The Optimal Viewing Position Effect in Beginning and Dyslexic Readers

Keywords: reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, OVP effect, visuo-attentional and lexical processing

The present study compared the reading ability of first-grade and dyslexic children using an experimental paradigm known to elicit the optimal viewing position (OVP) effect in skilled readers. Word frequency and initial fixation location were manipulated in a word identification task. The results showed an OVP effect for both groups. However, wordrecognition performance was lower for the dyslexic than for the first-grade group. In addition, whereas beginning readers obtained the typical inverted J-shape curve, dyslexics had a symmetric curve. These results were corroborated by a letter-report analysis showing that dyslexics failed to report word endings, even when fixating at that location. Robust effects of word frequency were also obtained for both groups. But unlike adult readers, this factor did not interact with fixation position.

Normal reading in alphabetic languages begins with the perception of the letter units that make up words. Except for this first stage of the process, there is no consensus about the mechanisms necessary for skilled reading or how they might be impaired in the specific reading disability (developmental dyslexia). Previous research has been largely devoted to specifying the role of phonological skills in learning to read (e.g. [START_REF] Goswami | Phonological skills and learning to read[END_REF]Sprenger-Charolles et al., in press). However, reading also requires an accurate visual analysis that allows for the precise decoding of the written words. This is usually accomplished by shifting from distributed attention to more focused attention, which is also useful for minimizing the effect of laterally distracting information [START_REF] Laberge | Theory of attentional operations in shape identification[END_REF]. It follows that the ability to orient the focus of attention as well as the ability to control its size are assumed to be deeply involved in reading [START_REF] Morris | Eye movements in skilled reading: Implications for developmental dyslexia[END_REF]. Whereas it is likely that both phonology and visual attention contribute to skilled reading acquisition and its dysfunction, few studies have been conducted to examine visuo-attentional processes related to word recognition skills in children as they learn to read. Similarly, although it is widely accepted that one of the major causes of developmental dyslexia is a phonological deficit (e.g. [START_REF] Badley | Categorizing sounds and learning to read: A causal connection[END_REF], there is still a great deal of argument about whether dyslexics' visuospatial attention disorder actually causes a reading deficit. In addition to poor performance on tasks requiring phonological awareness, dyslexic children can show visual perception deficits (e.g. letters in a wrong or inverted position, words that are distorted or overlapping) and/or visual attention impairments (e.g. problems focusing attention) when they attempt to read [START_REF] Facoetti | The role of visuospatial attention in developmental dyslexia: evidence from a rehabilitation study[END_REF]. These deficits cannot be attributed to a purely phonological dysfunction. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between lexical and visuo-attentional processes in beginning and dyslexic readers. Previous studies on skilled readers have suggested that the variable viewing position paradigm can be used to investigate visuo-attentional and lexical processing in reading (e.g. [START_REF] Kajii | Optimal viewing position in vertically and horizontally presented Japanese words[END_REF]. A typical finding about the perception of written words in adults is that the ease with which printed words are recognized depends on the position where the eyes initially fixate. Word-recognition performance is maximal slightly left of the word's center and decreases on both sides of this optimal viewing position (OVP) [START_REF] O'regan | Optimal viewing position effect in word recognition: A challenge to current theory[END_REF]O'Regan, Lévy-Schoen, Pynte, & Brugaillère, 1984;[START_REF] Vitu | Optimal landing position in reading isolated words and continuous text[END_REF]). This position is optimal for word recognition because it lowers the probability of refixation and thus shortens recognition time, with a delay of 20 ms for each letter away from this position. This OVP effect has been reported for a variety of dependent measures. Naming latencies and lexical decision times are the shortest when the eye starts to fixate the word near its center [START_REF] O'regan | Optimal viewing position effect in word recognition: A challenge to current theory[END_REF][START_REF] O'regan | Convenient fixation location within isolated words of different length and structure[END_REF], and the correct identification percentage is the highest for fixation at the OVP [START_REF] Farid | How initial fixation position influences visual word recognition: A comparison of French and Arabic[END_REF][START_REF] Nazir | On words and their letters[END_REF]. Researchers seem to agree that the major determinant of the OVP effect is the decrease in visual acuity outside the center of fixation, so letters viewed centrally will benefit from higher resolution and thus better visibility than those that fall near the edge [START_REF] Jacobs | Visual resolution and contour interaction in the fovea and periphery[END_REF]. If the drop in acuity was the only significant factor, the OVP would be located at the word's midpoint. The off-center location of the OVP might be explained by two additional factors, namely, the fact that in languages like English and French, words are read from left to right, and the fact that for these languages, most words can be guessed from their beginning (since word beginnings allegedly provide a higher degree of lexical constraint 1 than word endings; for a discussion, see [START_REF] Farid | How initial fixation position influences visual word recognition: A comparison of French and Arabic[END_REF][START_REF] O'regan | Convenient fixation location within isolated words of different length and structure[END_REF]. Another aspect that is relevant to our discussion concerns the strength of the OVP effect for high-and lowfrequency words. Using a lexical decision task, O'Regan and [START_REF] O'regan | Optimal viewing position effect in word recognition: A challenge to current theory[END_REF] showed that the penalty for not fixating the OVP seems to be greater for low-frequency words, thus suggesting an interaction between fixation position and frequency 2 . If this interaction is real, it is conceivable that it might be explained by saying that for high-frequency words, the ability to infer poorly-seen letters may be greater, and the cost may be smaller as the eye gradually deviates from the OVP.

Arguments for a relationship between reading ability and visuo-attentional processes are provided by the view that fixating the OVP aids word recognition (see [START_REF] O'regan | Optimal viewing position effect in word recognition: A challenge to current theory[END_REF] and that this position may vary as a function of lexical factors [START_REF] O'regan | Convenient fixation location within isolated words of different length and structure[END_REF]. It therefore seems plausible that less-than-optimum reading caused by failure to fixate the OVP is related to reading ability. The recognition performance of a beginning reader can vary, for instance, with the ability to identify individual letters in words and/or with the degree to which the child can take advantage of redundancy in the structure of written language. Using the fixation-contingent display, [START_REF] Aghababian | Developing normal reading skills: Aspects of visual processes underlying word recognition[END_REF] showed that in beginning readers, the OVP effect emerges very early during acquisition, thus suggesting that beginning readers extract visual information from print in much the same way as proficient readers do. Note however that the lexical processing performance of these first-grade children was not examined. Conclusions regarding the processing of information beyond the center of fixation may not apply to readers diagnosed as dyslexic, and differences related to the OVP may be found between normally-reading children and those undergoing treatment for reading problems. The following study assessed the reading ability of dyslexics and first graders, using a word identification task in combination with the variable viewing position technique. EXPERIMENT As seen in the introduction, the OVP phenomenon in recognition accuracy for briefly presented words is likely to result from a combination of visuo-attentional and lexical factors, the contribution of lexical factors varying with visuo-attentional factors. Our aim in the present study was thus to further investigate the visuo-attentional and lexical processing of first-grade and dyslexic children, using the OVP paradigm. More specifically, we wanted to determine whether word-frequency and fixation-location effects would occur in both dyslexic and first graders. Our second aim was to further describe the nature of the reading deficit that characterizes developmental dyslexia. Note that theoretically, the presence of an OVP effect implies that there is a position where all letters in a string can be processed in a minimal number of fixations (optimally, one). This point is important with respect to dyslexia. If dyslexic readers are unable to process all letters in a word rapidly, as normal readers do, they should not show the typical OVP effect. Dyslexic children might compensate for their reading deficit by referring to local salient features in the words or to letter clusters. As these salient features are randomly distributed across words, the viewing position (VP) curves should therefore be flat. If the system that supports normal reading is functioning at least partially, we should find a VP-curve that differs from that of normal beginning readers only by shape or height.

Method

Participants. Thirty-five children were tested: 20 were first graders (mean age 6.8 years) and 15 were dyslexics (mean age 9.3 years). They were selected from a neurological rehabilitation ward on the basis of their reading level (i.e. 6.8 years) assessed with the Alouette's standardized reading test [START_REF] Lefavrais | Test de l'Alouette[END_REF].

Materials. A pool of 120 critical words was selected from Manulex (Lété, Sprenger-Charolles, & Colé, submitted). Manulex is a computerized lexical database which provides frequency-based lists of non-lemmatized and lemmatized words compiled from the 1.9 million words found in the main French primary school reading books. Frequency 3 is given for four levels: 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd to 5th grades, and all grades combined. The stimuli for this study were extracted from the first grade lemma lexicon: 60 were high-frequency words (mean = 406 per million) and 60 were low-frequency words (mean = 16 per million). All words were 5 or 6 letters long.

Task and procedure. Stimulus presentation was on a 17" color monitor connected to a Pentium III laptop computer running the DMDX software package [START_REF] Forster | DMDX version 2.9.01[END_REF] version 2.9.01). The stimuli were displayed in lowercase in 24-point Courier font. Each word was divided into five equally-wide zones (i.e. 1 letter wide for five-letter words and 1.2 letters wide for six-letter words). Words were presented in such a way that subjects initially fixated the center of each zone (hereafter called positions P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5). Each word was seen from all five fixation positions. Exposure time for the target was determined individually for each participant, depending on his/her correct identification score on a training session (in which we looked for the presentation duration that produced scores ranging between 50-75% correct four-letter word identification, i.e., about 175 ms for first-grade children and 250 ms for dyslexics). Each trial consisted of the following sequence of events. Participants were first instructed to look at a fixation point at the beginning of each trial, and not to move their eyes. After 500 ms, the fixation point was replaced by a target word that was displayed on the screen for the duration previously determined for that particular child. The word was displaced laterally with respect to the fixation point according to its position condition. Then the word was replaced by a backward mask which consisted of a string of hashes. The task was to identify (name) the target word. If not possible, participants were asked to report as many letters as they could in the correct position. The experimenter manually recorded each participant's response. The mask remained on the screen until the experimenter pressed the spaced bar to trigger the next trial.

Results

Correct word identifications. The mean percentage of correct word identifications was calculated for all participants and all items pooled. In each group, a 2 (Lexical Frequency) x 5 (Fixation Position) ANOVA was conducted with subjects (F1) and items (F2) as random factors. Lexical frequency was treated as a between-factor in the by-item analysis. Figure 1 summarizes the correct word identification results as a function of lexical frequency and fixation position for the first-grade and dyslexic children. In the first-grade group, the ANOVA revealed a significant effect of lexical frequency, F1 (1, 19) = 165.69, p < .001, MSE = 212; F2 (1, 118) = 65.35, p < .001, MSE = 1612. More high-frequency words than low-frequency words were identified (76% vs. 50%, respectively). A significant effect of fixation position was also found. There were more correct identifications when the viewing position corresponded to the middle of the word (79% in P2 and P3) than to the beginning (62% in P1) or the end (59% and 39% in P4 and P5, respectively), F1 (4, 76) = 69.25, p < .001, MSE = 158; F2 (4, 472) = 65.45, p < .001, MSE = 503. No interaction was found between the two factors (see Figure 1), F1 (4, 76) = 1.89, p = .12, MSE = 165; F2 (4, 472) = 1.86, p = .12, MSE = 503.

-------------------------------------Insert Figure 1 about here -------------------------------------The dyslexic children also exhibited a main effect of lexical frequency. Highfrequency words were identified with more accuracy than low-frequency words (36% vs. 14%, respectively), F1 (1, 14) = 49.38, p < .001, MSE = 382; F2 (1, 118) = 48.27, p < .001, MSE = 1466. A main effect of fixation position was found, F1 (4, 56) = 9.72, p < .001, MSE = 162; F2 (4, 472) = 14.13, p < .001, MSE = 490. Dyslexic children identified 34% and 29% of the words at P2 and P3, respectively vs. 20% at P1 and 16% at P5. Again, no interaction was found between these two factors, F1 (4, 56) = 1.78, p = .15, MSE = 112; F2 (4, 472) = 1.67, p = .16, MSE = 490.

As can be seen in Figure 1, the results also revealed systematic differences in the height and shape of the first-grade and dyslexic children's VP curves. With respect to height, word recognition performance was lower for the dyslexic group (25%) than for the first-grade group (64%). With respect to shape, first-grade children showed more asymmetry between P1 and P5 (23%) than did dyslexic children (4%) (note that a floor effect could be suspected for low-frequency words but not for high-frequency words). An ANOVA restricted to positions P1 and P5 in both groups confirmed this result with a significant interaction between position and subject group, F1 (1, 33) = 17.03, p < .001, MSE = 176; F2 (1, 118) = 18.17, p < .001, MSE = 594 and for high-frequency words only, F1 (1, 33) = 6.32, p < .05, MSE = 252; F2 (1, 59) = 7.66, p < .01, MSE = 783.

Correct letter reports. To further investigate this qualitative difference in the shape of the two VP curves, the correct letter-report percentage was computed for each letter in the stimuli in each fixation position condition, when participants failed to identify the target word. A letter was only considered to be correctly reported if it was in the right position. In addition, for clarity, three stimulus zones were defined: the beginning (1 st and 2 nd letters), the middle (3 rd and 4 th letters) and the end (5 th and 6 th letters) of the word. Figure 2 presents the percentage of correct reports at each fixation position for each zone.

-------------------------------------Insert Figure 2 about here -------------------------------------In case of failure to identify the word, both groups correctly reported the beginning of the word at least 50% of the time, whatever the fixation position. However, the results revealed differences between beginning and dyslexic readers for the middle and the end of the word. For first-grade children, the highest report accuracy was observed for letters around the fixation location, independently of where the eye first fixated. However, dyslexic children did not benefit from proximity to the fixation position, particularly for reporting the last two letters in the word.

GENERAL DISCUSSION In the present article, we investigated the reading ability of beginning and dyslexic readers, using a experimental paradigm that is known to elicit a highly stable pattern of performance in skilled readers. This pattern consists of a systematic variation in reading performance as a function of the position of the eyes in the word: word recognition performance is best when the eyes fixate slightly to the left of the word's center and decreases when the eyes deviate from this OVP and moves towards the beginning or the end of the letter string [START_REF] Nazir | On words and their letters[END_REF][START_REF] O'regan | Optimal viewing position effect in word recognition: A challenge to current theory[END_REF].

Visuo-attentional processing. In line with [START_REF] Aghababian | Developing normal reading skills: Aspects of visual processes underlying word recognition[END_REF], our results confirmed that very early during reading acquisition, the typical OVP effect is already present. No difference between beginning and skilled reading patterns was apparent. Recognition performance was best when the child fixated regions in the word where the greatest number of letters could be recognized and where most words could be guessed, that is, left of center. Visual-field asymmetries comparable to those observed with adults were evident by the end of the first year of reading instruction. Like beginning readers, dyslexic children exhibited a systematic variation in reading performance when their eyes were fixating different locations in the word, suggesting that the system that supports normal reading was at least partly functioning. However, the shape of this VP function was qualitatively different from the norm. Whereas beginning readers showed the typical inverted J-shape function with a difference between fixating at the beginning and the end of the word, dyslexics had a symmetrical curve. The presence of a significant effect of fixation position indicates that dyslexics did not compensate for their reading deficit by referring to local salient features in the words or to letter clusters. According to [START_REF] Nazir | On words and their letters[END_REF], asymmetries in the VP curve might be caused by a difference in the ability to identify letters in the left and right visual fields. Note that, in a target detecting task, [START_REF] Brannan | Allocation of visual attention in good and poor readers[END_REF] showed that good readers and adults were significantly more accurate when the target appeared on the right side of a fixation point (RVF enhancement), but poor readers were equally accurate on the two sides. The absence of the characteristic left-right asymmetry thus suggests abnormal processing of information outside of foveal vision for dyslexics. It may be that skilled readers develop an automatic bias towards information processing in the RVF while less skilled readers fail to do so. This idea is strengthened by our analysis on letter reports, which revealed that dyslexics are very poor at reporting letters situated near the end of the word, even when the initial fixation is imposed at this location. It remains to be seen whether this deficit results from particular scanning strategies [START_REF] Brannan | Allocation of visual attention in good and poor readers[END_REF] or from a narrow perceptual span [START_REF] Aghababian | Developing normal reading skills: Aspects of visual processes underlying word recognition[END_REF].

Lexical processing. Robust effects of word frequency were obtained for first-grade and dyslexic children. As can be seen in Figure 1, the VP curves of the two groups differed in height, which indicates a poor lexicon for the dyslexics. However, it is interesting to note that the magnitude of the effect was comparable in the two groups, thus suggesting that activation of lexical knowledge is not impaired in dyslexics. Unlike adult readers, no interaction was found between fixation position and frequency. For first-grade children and for dyslexics as well, visuo-attentional and lexical factors were additive, in that frequency increased height equally for all viewing positions. We thus conclude that, also lexical competence was clearly poorer for the dyslexics, the mental lexicon seemed to be used in the same way by both groups in word recognition.

In conclusion, the present data clearly show that the reading system of dyslexics is functioning at least to some extent. Dyslexics exhibited a strong frequency effect and an OVP effect, although the shape and height of their VP curve was not conventional. Under fast exposure durations, words can be read and lexical knowledge can be actived in a single fixation. The only qualitative difference between beginning and dyslexic readers consists of non-RVF enhancement in dyslexics, thus suggesting a deficit in visuo-attentional processing.

AUTHORS' NOTE

Support for this research was partly provided by a grant from the "Conseil Régional PACA" to the first author and by an APN Research Fellowship from the CNRS to the first author. Correspondence should be addressed to Stéphanie Ducrot, Laboratoire Parole et Langage CNRS UMR 6057, Université de Provence, 29 avenue Robert Schuman, 13621 Aixen-Provence cedex 1, France, or via e-mail to sducrot@up.univ-mrs.fr.

FOOTNOTES

1 . Lexical constraints are what determine the number of possible words one can correctly infer from a limited quantity of information.

2 . Note however that according to Nazir's model, variables that affect the word as a unit (e.g. frequency of occurrence of a word) have an additive effect on the OVP and change the total height of the VP curve without altering its shape (see [START_REF] Aghababian | Developing normal reading skills: Aspects of visual processes underlying word recognition[END_REF], for a discussion).

3 . The frequency computations are grade-level-based and weighted by an index of dispersion among the schoolbooks. This led to a better estimate of the true frequency that would be found in a corpus of infinite size. The database was developed as in the Educator's Word Frequency Guide (Zeno, Ivens, Millard & Duvvuri, 1995) used for the English language. In a study on age of acquisition, [START_REF] Zevin | Age of acquisition effects in word reading and other tasks[END_REF] used the sum of the grade-level frequencies and found that the Zeno et al. counts were more closely correlated with latencies than were earlier counts such as those extracted from adult corpora like [START_REF] Kučera | Computational analysis of present-day American English[END_REF] norms, suggesting that, for language acquisition research, precise child norms must be used to measure how often words are experienced by children during their exposure to print.

Figure 1 .

 1 Figure 1. Correct word-identification percentage as a function of lexical frequency and fixation position, for first grade and dyslexic children.

Figure 2 .

 2 Figure 2. Correct letter-report percentage as a function of stimulus zone and fixation position, for first grade and dyslexic children.