Spelling Acquisition in Spanish: Using Error Analyses to Examine Individual Differences in Phonological and Orthographic Processing

The abc of the b and c in Spanish: inconsistent and context dependent letter errors and the development of orthographic knowledge in primary school children

“…This claim was supported by the fact that frequency effects were not strong and only significant by participants. This is consistent with other studies showing that learning inconsistent structures can be problematic even in transparent orthographies (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2021). Our study adds to the growing evidence that these errors persist even until 5th grade, and that difficulties with context-dependent structures are particularly prevalent in naming, whilst inconsistent structures tend to be more problematic for writing in all grades.…”

“…This finding, together with the frequency effects observed in neutral words earlier than in context-dependent and inconsistent words, suggests that children acquire lexical knowledge about consistent and frequent representations quite easily, but that incongruent letter-sound patterns need more time to be finely tuned. Extending the results of Zhang et al (2021), our data reveal that inconsistent structures seem to be particularly reluctant to consolidation. This finding will be further discussed in the general discussion section.…”

“…Additionally, the error rate was significantly greater for infrequent syllabic combinationse.g., the combination ba is more infrequent in Spanish than the combination bo-. This outcome supports the idea of a sensitivity of Spanish children towards sublexical structures, and goes in line with recent findings with children from kindergarten to 3rd grade (Zhang et al, 2021). These authors settled three developmental phases according to specific error profiles.…”

“…The second aim of the study is to identify the most frequent errors at different grades, as well as the characteristics of the words that present these errors. Previous studies have reported several systematic writing and reading errors including letter substitutions, additions, omissions and transpositions in Spanish children until 3rd grade, together with other type of syllabic errors and incorrect use of silent letter h (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2021). We set out to identify specific orthographic knowledge difficulties in 3rd to 5th grade children, by exploring the common errors committed at this period in which orthographic representations are consolidating.…”

“…This however, does not inform which words generate these errors, or if there are other types of errors such as omissions, substitutions or transpositions. To answer the second question, the pattern of errors made in both tasks was examined, by establishing ten errorcategories based on previous reading and writing studies in Spanish (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2018;Goikoetxea, 2006;Justicia et al, 1999;Zhang et al, 2021):…”