Paz Suárez-Coalla

From Grapheme to Word in Reading Acquisition in Spanish.

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation of some words. However, children whose languages have transparent orthographies need only learn to pronounce graphemes to be able to read any word. In this study, the reading evolution of Spanish-speaking children was investigated for the purpose of discovering when and for what types of stimuli lexical information is used in Spanish. Five- to 10-year-old children were presented with lists of stimuli in which lexicality, frequency, and length were manipulated. The results in terms of reading accuracy and speed showed that the influence of stimulus length is great in the early grades and later diminishes, and just the opposite is the case for lexicality and frequency. These data suggest that reading acquisition in Spanish constitutes a continuum that ranges from phonological recoding to the use of lexical strategies, and that this transition is made at a very early stage, at least for the most frequent words.

Variables predictoras de la lectura y la escritura en castellano

Resumen La posibilidad de predecir el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura ha sido objeto de numerosas investigaciones. Las habilidades de procesamiento fonológico y velocidad de denominación aparecen entre los mejores predictores en la mayor parte de los estudios. Sin embargo, muchos de los resultados se han obtenido en lenguas diferentes del castellano y con estudios que evalúan esas capacidades cuando los niños ya saben leer, por tanto la relación de la lectura y escritura con otras habilidades podría ser fruto del aprendizaje. El objetivo de este estudio fue determinar qué variables permiten predecir la adquisición de la lectura mecánica, así como de la escritura, en castellano. Se aplicaron tareas de conciencia fonémica, repetición de pseudopalabras, amplitud de memoria, fluidez verbal y denominación rápida y automatizada, a un grupo de 50 niños prelectores. Dieciocho meses después, cuando ya sabían leer y escribir, se les evaluó en lectura y escritura. Con los datos obtenidos, se realizaron análisis de correlación de Pearson, análisis factorial y análisis de regresión lineal. La conciencia fonológica fue la variable que mejor predijo la exactitud lectora y la escritura, mientras que la denominación rápida de dibujos predijo la velocidad lectora. Estos datos indican que es posible pronosticar la adquisición de la lectura y escritura antes de su enseñanza. Así mismo, nos sugieren que es posible intervenir tempranamente, especialmente en aquellos niños que presenten riesgo de dificultades de aprendizaje.

Reading strategies in Spanish developmental dyslexics

Cross-linguistic studies suggest that the orthographic system determines the reading performance of dyslexic children. In opaque orthographies, the fundamental feature of developmental dyslexia is difficulty in reading accuracy, whereas slower reading speed is more common in transparent orthographies. The aim of the current study was to examine the extent to which different variables of words affect reaction times and articulation times in developmental dyslexics. A group of 19 developmental dyslexics of different ages and an age-matched group of 19 children without reading disabilities completed a word naming task. The children were asked to read 100 nouns that differed in length, frequency, age of acquisition, imageability, and orthographic neighborhood. The stimuli were presented on a laptop computer, and the responses were recorded using DMDX software. We conducted analyses of mixed-effects models to determine which variables influenced reading times in dyslexic children. We found that word naming skills in dyslexic children are affected predominantly by length, while in non-dyslexics children the principal variable is the age of acquisition, a lexical variable. These findings suggest that Spanish-speaking developmental dyslexics use a sublexical procedure for reading words, which is reflected in slower speed when reading long words. In contrast, normal children use a lexical strategy, which is frequently observed in readers of opaque languages.

Spelling impairments in Spanish dyslexic adults

Spelling deficits have repeatedly been observed in children with dyslexia. However, the few studies addressing this issue in dyslexic adults have reported contradictory results. We investigated whether Spanish dyslexics show spelling deficits in adulthood and which components of the writing production process might be impaired in developmental dyslexia. In order to evaluate the involvement of the lexical and the sublexical routes of spelling as well as the graphemic buffer, lexical frequency, phonology-to-orthography consistency and word length were manipulated in two writing tasks: a direct copy transcoding task and a spelling-to-dictation task. Results revealed that adults with dyslexia produced longer written latencies, inter-letter intervals, writing durations and more errors than their peers without dyslexia. Moreover, the dyslexics were more affected by lexical frequency and word length than the controls, but both groups showed a similar effect of P-O consistency. Written latencies also revealed that while the dyslexics initiated the response later in the direct copy transcoding task than in the spelling-to-dictation task, the controls showed the opposite pattern. However, the dyslexics were slower than the controls in both tasks. Results were consistent with the hypothesis that spelling difficulties are present in adults with dyslexia, at least in a language with a transparent orthography such as Spanish. These difficulties seem to be associated with a deficit affecting both lexical processing and the ability to maintain information about the serial order of the letters in a word. However, the dyslexic group did not differ from the control group in the application of the P-O conversion procedures. The spelling impairment would be in addition to the reading deficit, leading to poorer performance in direct copy transcoding compared to spelling-to-dictation.

The role of morphology in reading in Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia.

Morphemes facilitate visual word recognition, leading to greater accuracy and fluency in reading morphologically complex words. In children with dyslexia, the morphological structure might be useful to reduce difficulties caused by phonological deficits. The aim of this study was to determine whether Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia benefit from morphemes when reading. A group of children with dyslexia of different ages (7 to 10 years) and a group of children without reading disabilities, matched on chronological age and gender, participated in a task of reading isolated words and pseudowords in which morphological complexity was manipulated. Half of the stimuli were morphologically simple and half morphologically complex. Children with dyslexia benefit from morphology since they have better performance with the morphologically complex stimuli. These results indicate that they are able to develop representations of units larger than the grapheme, what suggests that Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia use the morphological structure to overcome their difficulties in phonological recoding. These results have important implications for the rehabilitation of children with dyslexia.

The Role of Reading Fluency in Children's Text Comprehension

Understanding a written text requires some higher cognitive abilities that not all children have. Some children have these abilities, since they understand oral texts; however, they have difficulties with written texts, probably due to problems in reading fluency. The aim of this study was to determine which aspects of reading fluency are related to reading comprehension. Four expositive texts, two written and two read by the evaluator, were presented to a sample of 103 primary school children (third and sixth grade). Each text was followed by four comprehension questions. From this sample we selected two groups of participants in each grade, 10 with good results in comprehension of oral and written texts, and 10 with good results in oral and poor in written comprehension. These 40 subjects were asked to read aloud a new text while they were recorded. Using Praat software some prosodic parameters were measured, such as pausing and reading rate (number and duration of the pauses and utterances), pitch and intensity changes and duration in declarative, exclamatory, and interrogative sentences and also errors and duration in words by frequency and stress. We compared the results of both groups with ANOVAs. The results showed that children with less reading comprehension made more inappropriate pauses and also intersentential pauses before comma than the other group and made more mistakes in content words; significant differences were also found in the final declination of pitch in declarative sentences and in the F0 range in interrogative ones. These results confirm that reading comprehension problems in children are related to a lack in the development of a good reading fluency.

The impact of word frequency on peripheral processes during handwriting: A matter of age

Although several studies have found that the sublexical route of spelling has an effect on handwriting movements, the ability of lexical variables to modulate peripheral processes during writing is less clear. This study addresses the hypothesis that word frequency affects writing durations only during writing acquisition, and that at some point of development, the handwriting system becomes a relatively autonomous system unaffected by lexical variables. Spanish children attending Grades 2, 4, and 6 performed a spelling-to-dictation and a copy task in which word frequency was manipulated. Results revealed that written latencies decreased with age, especially between Grades 2 and 4, and that writing durations decreased between these two groups. All these measures were longer during copying but the effect of task on written latencies and in-air pen trajectories was smaller for older children. Crucially, a significant word frequency effect on writing durations was observed only in Grade 2. This effect was marginally significant in Grade 4 and disappeared in Grade 6. However, all groups showed a similar effect of word frequency on written latencies. These findings suggest that lexical processes impact peripheral processes during writing acquisition and that this influence diminishes to eventually disappear at some point in development.

Influence of context-sensitive rules on the formation of orthographic representations in Spanish dyslexic children.

Spanish-speaking developmental dyslexics are mainly characterized by poor reading fluency. One reason for this lack of fluency could be a difficulty in creating and accessing lexical representations, because, as the self-teaching theory suggest, it is necessary to develop orthographic representations to use direct reading (Share, 1995). It is possible that this difficulty to acquire orthographic representations can be specifically related to words that contain context-sensitive graphemes, since it has been demonstrated that reading is affected by this kind of graphemes (Barca et al., 2007). In order to test this possibility we compared a group of dyslexic children with a group of normal readers (9–13 years), in a task of repeated reading. Pseudo-words (half short and half long) with simple and contextual dependent rules were used. The length effect reduction on the reading speed, after repeated exposure, was considered an indicator of orthographic representation development, as the length effect is strong when reading unknown words, but absent when reading familiar words. The results show that dyslexic children have difficulties in developing orthographic representations, not only with context-sensitive graphemes, but also with simple graphemes. In contrast to the control children, in the dyslexic group differences between reading times for short and long stimuli remained without significant changes after six presentations. Besides, this happened with sensitive context rules and also with simple grapheme–phoneme conversion rules. On the other hand, response and articulation times were greatly affected by length in dyslexic children, indicating the use of serial reading. Results suggest that the problems related to storing orthographic representations could be caused by a learning deficit, independently of whether the word contained context-sensitive rules or not.

Prosodic Perception Problems in Spanish Dyslexia.

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to investigate the prosody abilities on top of phonological and visual abilities in children with dyslexia in Spanish that can be considered a syllable-timed language. The performances on prosodic tasks (prosodic perception, rise-time perception), phonological tasks (phonological awareness, rapid naming, verbal working memory), visual tasks (visual search) of 32 eleven-year-old children with dyslexia were compared with those of 32 typical readers with the same chronological age and 32 reading-matched younger children. It was found that children with dyslexia scored lower than typical readers on phonological and prosodic perception tasks but not on rise perception tasks. It can thus be concluded that children with dyslexia in Spanish show a prosodic impairment that may originate from subtle auditory-processing deficits.

Semantic and phonological influences on visual word learning in a transparent language

Orthographic representations of words are indispensable for reading fluency. The ways in which these representations are developed and their resistance to decay are hotly debated topics. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of semantic and phonological representations on the formation of orthographic representations in a transparent orthography. In order to achieve this objective, an experiment with three conditions was carried out. In the first condition, a group of university students were asked to repeatedly read 10 new words after semantic and phonological training, in the second condition another group of participants read the new words after phonological training, and in the third condition participants read without previous training. Finally, a follow-up session was performed to test the resistance to decay of the orthographic representations. The results showed that participants who had received semantic training formed the representations faster than participants in the other conditions, as indicated by the decrease in length effect. These results indicate the important role of previous knowledge when people face new written words. A month later these orthographic representations still remained in the lexicon of the participants.