This study was designed to assess the effects of four reading-training procedures for children with reading disabilities (RD) in a transparent orthography, with the aim of examining the effects of different spelling-to-sound units in computer speech-based reading. We selected a sample of 83 Spanish children aged between 7 years 1 month and 10 years 6 months (M = 105.2, SD = 7.8) whose pseudoword reading performance was below the 25th percentile and IQ > 90. The participants were randomly assigned to five groups: (a) the whole-word training group (WW) (n = 17), (b) the syllable training group (S)(n = 16), (c) the onset-rime training group (OR) (n = 17), (d) the phoneme training group (P) (n = 15), and (e) the untrained control group (n = 18). Children were pre- and post-tested in word recognition, reading comprehension, phonological awareness, and orthographic and phonological tasks. The results indicate that experimental groups who participated in the phoneme and syllable conditions improved their word recognition in comparison with the control group. In addition, dyslexics who participated in the phoneme, syllable, and onset-rime conditions made a greater number of requests during computer-based word reading under conditions that required extensive phonological computation (low frequency words and long words). Reading time, however, was greater for long words in the phoneme group during computer-based reading. These results suggest the importance of training phonological processes in improving word decoding in children with dyslexia who learn in a consistent orthography.

The aim of this study was the standardization, and analysis of the developmental profile of two tasks for the assessment of verbal fluency (semantic and phonological), in a large sample of Spanish-speaking child population. We analyzed the development of both tasks within a context of cross-sectional design. A selected a sample of 1.032 subjects aged between 6 years and 3 months to 12 years and four months between first and sixth grade were of primary education. The semantic verbal fluency was evaluated with the task ‘animals in 1 minute’ and the phonologic verbal fluency was evaluated with ‘F, A, M’ in a minute for each one’. The results show a progressive improvement in performance as a function of age in both tests. We present tables of means, standard deviations and percentiles for different age groups.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether Spanish children that are learning to read use the syllable unit in word reading. We used a visual version of the syllable monitoring technique (Mehler, Dommerges, Freavenfelder & Seguí, 1981). For Experiment I, we selected first grade readers at the end of the first year of reading instruction. In the Experiment II we selected second grade readers at the middle of the second year of reading instruction. Participants responded whenever the structure of the target string (e.g., bal) appeared at the beginning of a subsequently presented printed word (e.g., bala). The target was either a consonant-vowel (CV) or consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) structure and either did or did not correspond to the initial syllable of the target-bearing word. At the end of the first year of reading instruction, children showed significant effects of syllable compatibility (faster detection times when the targets correspond to the initial syllable of target-bearing words than when they did not). When we tested children of the second year of reading instruction, they also showed a syllable compatibility effect. These results suggest that Spanish children use syllabic units at the beginning of reading instruction in the visual word recognition.

The main purpose of this study has been to analyze the attention development in children of elementary grades and to obtain standardization of the test d2. A sample of 1.032 was selected 1 st to 6 th grade belonging to schools in the Canary Islands with an age range between 6 years and 3 months old to 12 years and 4 months old. We analyzed changes observed over the years in all variables measured by Test d2. The results found reveal the existence of significant changes in the productivity variables and effectiveness but not in the measure of errors. Furthermore, the percentiles were calculated for each of the measures of d2 for each age range.

The primary purpose of the study reported here was to explore the effects of the complexity of syllable structure and the effects of task differences in the explanation of deficit in phonological awareness (PA). A sample of 97 subjects was selected and organized into three different groups: 29 reading-disabled (RD) children, 41 normal readers matched in age with the former, and 27 younger normal readers at the same reading level as those with reading disabilities. We administered PA tasks which included items with different complexity of syllable structure. The results showed that the complexity of syllable structure had no particularly marked effect on the dyslexic children. Rather, the isolation task revealed the phonological deficit across all syllable structures.