ERIC Number: EJ866618
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2009-Oct
Pages: 19
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0142-7164
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
From Grapheme to Word in Reading Acquisition in Spanish
Cuetos, Fernando; Suarez-Coalla, Paz
Applied Psycholinguistics, v30 n4 p583-601 Oct 2009
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.
Descriptors: Stimuli, Pronunciation, Phonology, Morphemes, Graphemes, Spanish Speaking, Spanish, Children, Linguistic Input, Applied Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Language Processing, Orthographic Symbols, Phoneme Grapheme Correspondence, Language Acquisition, Child Development, Cognitive Development, Language Skills, Reading Skills, Reading Processes, Beginning Reading, Language Classification
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Elementary Education; Elementary Secondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A