Reading difficulties have reached a prevalence of 3-10% in schoolage children. Those who present these difficulties avoid reading and benefit very little from school-based learning opportunities, resulting in maladjustments, dropping out of school and having to repeat grades. Presented here are the results of an intervention based on a computer game intended for explicit phonic training in first-grade school children at risk of possessing reading difficulties. Fifty-six children from a low socioeconomic status (SES) and 31 children from a high socioeconomic status, divided into two groups (control and experimental), participated in the study. After the intervention, participants from the low-SES experimental group had enhanced their skills regarding letter sound recognition, whereas the high-SES experimental group had improved their naming speed. The results are discussed in light of the impact of interventions based on computer games and of the importance of the development of sublexical skills in children at risk of manifesting reading difficulties in transparent orthographies.

Executive functions (EF) are a set of processes that allow individuals to plan, monitor and organize tasks and thus play a key role in the development of reading and maths skills. Environmental factors such as socioeconomic level (SEL) influence reading and maths skills as well as EFs. The aim of this study is to explore the extent to which executive functions play a mediating role between SEL and reading and maths performance. To this end, we assessed 286 Chilean primary education students: 86 with a high SEL and 200 with a low level. The results show that the high-SEL group obtained consistently higher scores than their peers with low SEL levels in both reading and maths tasks as well as in EF measurements. This suggests that SEL could influence the development of these variables. The results also showed that EFs partially mediate the relation between SEL and reading and maths skills in primary school students through the specific function of inhibition. The results are discussed in light of the effect of SEL on the development of EFs and school learning.