English reading performance by Spanish speaking children: A phonologically or semantically mediated pathway?

Abstract

Reading acquisition involves connections between the spoken language and the writing system. The English-language writing system holds an inconsistent alphabetic system, thus encouraging readers to develop representations between the grapheme and the word. Reading in English as a Foreign language supposes a challenge, especially when the reader’s native language is consistent and learners live in a monolingual context, as is the case in Spain. This may cause difficulties in learning the grapheme-phoneme-conversion-rules and using different grain size units. The aim of this study was to address the reading strategies that Spanish children use when reading in English. We considered the influence of word length, lexical frequency, orthographic consistency (in onset, nucleus, coda, and rime), and semantic knowledge on word reading. We analyzed speed and accuracy in a reading aloud task of English words from 94 Spanish-speaking children (fourth, fifth and sixth grade). Participants also completed a translation task into Spanish taken from the previous English ones. Results showed the influence of word length in accuracy, as well as that of children's grade, onset consistency, and semantic knowledge on both accuracy and reading speed. Regarding sublexical units, onset reading accuracy was determined by onset consistency in all grades; nucleus accuracy was determined by rime consistency only in the sixth grade and coda accuracy by rime consistency in the fifth and sixth grades. The present study demonstrates the relevance of Spanish children's semantic knowledge when reading in English. Despite this, and in line with the statistical learning perspective, some regularities are used in correlation with greater reading experience in English.