Spanish is a regular language, and compared to other languages it has the most transparent orthography. Phoneme-grapheme correspondences are consistent. There are only a few irregularities that can be deduced from simple rules. Therefore, it is expected successfully learning in the first two years of schooling, where the reader can acquire great automaticity of decoding skills. As showed in other regular languages with transparent orthographies, phonological skills are important for the process of reading acquisition. Once acquired those skills, the reader can easily read any word or even a non-word (which represent unfamiliar words). A reading disability profile would be manifested in a clear phonological deficit in the first years (from 1 to 3 grade) and once the child has been widely exposed to reading strategies, "reading speed" would be another variable to take into account for the identification of poor readers.
Research conducted in Spanish (Jiménez González & Hernández Valle, 2000; Jiménez González & Haro, 1995; Jiménez & Ortiz, 1994; Rodriguez López & Jiménez González, 1999) shows that poor phonological skills are a characteristic of reading disabled children. When reading words, normal readers prefer the lexical route (orthographic route) when a good level of decoding is reached. This is probably because normal readers have a good repertoire of orthographic representations compared to poor readers, who most of the time have to resort to the phonological route. When the use of phonological route is necessary (as happens reading non-words), normal readers are superior because they are also good phonological decoders and therefore will make fewer errors.
In an age / reading level match study of 118 children (mean age of 8 years) conducted in Spain by Jiménez & Hernández (2000) differences in error performance between reading disabled and normal readers were significant. The error rate was greater in children with RD than in non-disabled readers, in terms of word length, word frequency and lexicality: they made more errors in long non-words, unfamiliar words and non-words. They also analysed the reaction times in the same groups, and the results demonstrated that there were differences in the naming task.The RD group showed longer latency of naming than the normal group, for both words and non-words.
These
results support the theory of the dual route when reading word / non-words,
and also gives and important support to the phonological deficit core in
dyslexia in languages with a transparent orthography such as Spanish. It
also points out the "time" or "speed" factor, in that RD children spent
more time reading. If we were to do the same study but in adults, as they
might have a better sight vocabulary to compensate their phonological deficit,
the diagnostic measure should be "latency or speed" when reading words
and non-words. More research is needed in Spanish, comparing these results
with matched English speaking children, just as the studies conducted in
German,
Hebrew and Dutch..
PA: phonological abilities
RD:
reading disability / reading disabled
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