This study was intended to help clarify the nature of dyslexia in Spanish. A sample of 30 children, 8 to 16 years old, participated in this study. Dyslexic children were compared to two control groups, a chronological age-matched control group and a reading level-matched control group. Measures included nonword and pseudohomophone reading (phonological procedure), homophone choice (orthographic procedure), and phonological awareness tasks (syllabic, intrasyllabic, and phonemic level). For each task, accuracy (error percentage) and performance time were measured. Results showed a deficit in the dyslexic group on all the tasks, which was more evident when time was considered. With the results consistent with studies in other transparent orthographies such as Italian and German, speed problems seem to be more evident and relevant than accuracy problems in Spanish dyslexic children.

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This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. b s t r a c tPhonological development was assessed in six alphabetic orthographies (English, French, Greek, Icelandic, Portuguese and Spanish) at the beginning and end of the first year of reading instruction. The aim was to explore contrasting theoretical views regarding: the question of the availability of phonology at the outset of learning to read (Study 1); the influence of orthographic depth on the pace of phonological development during the transition to literacy (Study 2); and the impact of literacy instruction (Study 3). Results from 242 children did not reveal a consistent sequence of development as performance varied according to task demands and language. Phonics instruction appeared more influential than orthographic depth in the emergence of an early meta-phonological capacity to manipulate phonemes, and preliminary indications were that cross-linguistic variation was associated with speech rhythm more than factors such as syllable complexity. The implications of the outcome for current models of phonological development are discussed.

This study undertakes a cross-linguistic comparison of reading and spelling acquisition inThe present paper compares the early development of reading and spelling in three Romance languages, namely French, Portuguese and Spanish. Most cross-linguistic studies show a variation in the speed of acquisition of these

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In this article we intend to describe the evolution of the Spanish linguistic system (spoken and written) from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives, as well as to describe its current form; the main aim is to show how current Spanish language characteristics influence and explain, in part, the existing data about literacy acquisition in Spanish.

During a school year, samples of words written by three groups of children of successive ages were collected. Two groups of children were in first and second year of Kindergarten (4 and 5 years of age), when alphabetic rules were not taught in a systematic way. The third group was in first year of Primary School (6 years of age), and was being taught to read and spell in a systematic way. After classifying the words written by the children, seven categories of spelling were obtained, which may represent different stages in their learning process. Their analysis showed that they are related to different types of knowledge and processes, mainly phonological ones. The results show that the development of spelling in Spanish does not qualitatively differ from that of children who learn to spell in opaque writing systems. The differences mainly involve the time it takes to learn, and the rate of acquisition.The developmental models of spelling acquisition that have been put forward over the last two decades (Ehri) share three main features: (i) they are suprime, especially based on the analysis of the errors children make when trying to spell new words, (ii) they are theories that describe the stages of the spelling development and (iii) they mainly focus on the phonological skills of children, although they admit the importance of orthographic knowledge (Ellis, 1994).These models and the empirical work derived from them have given rise to the acceptance of three major stages that children progressively go through when they are learning how to spell. The first stage is basically pre-communicative. The children represent words based on their visual features (a logographic procedure), and still do not relate sounds and letters in words. After this stage, the process of acquiring the alphabetic principle begins. The children learn the phoneme-grapheme correspondence rules (PGCs from now on). Finally, once the code is mastered, the children reach the last stage, where their spelling is orthographically Reading and Writing (2005) 18:81-98 Ó Springer 2005