The role of sublexical variables in reading fluency development among Spanish children

Álvarez‐Cañizo, Marta; Suárez‐Coalla, Paz; Cuetos, Fernando

doi:10.1017/s0305000917000514

Cited by 12 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…• Appropriate pauses (i.e., pauses made when a punctuation mark, such as a full stop, comma and colon is encountered). Experienced readers make shorter appropriate pauses while reading (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2015(Álvarez-Cañizo et al, , 2018Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008Schwanenflugel et al, 2004). • Inappropriate pauses (i.e., pauses made in the absence of a punctuation mark indicating a break, whether between words, within words or at the end of a line in the printed text).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With this in mind, a number of studies of reading prosody have been conducted with Spanish children. Álvarez-Cañizo, et al (2018) compared the reading aloud of third-grade and fifth-grade children with that of an adult sample, using a text that manipulated the type and length of the sentences but not other variables such as word type, word frequency or syntactic structure of sentences. The results showed that children from both grades made longer inappropriate pauses than did adults and that third graders also made more inappropriate pauses than fifth graders and adults.…”

Section: What This Paper Addsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We also took into account certain variables considered to influence reading, such as sentence type (declarative and interrogative sentences) and word frequency. As regards sentence type, children achieve adult-like prosody in declarative sentences before they do in interrogative or exclamatory sentences (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2018) because the former are the most common in children's texts. This led us to hypothesise that differences between children's and normative prosody expressed in declarative sentences would only be detectable in the first stages of primary education.…”

Section: What This Paper Addsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Development of reading prosody in school‐age Spanish children: a longitudinal study

Álvarez‐Cañizo

Martínez-García

Cuetos

et al. 2019

Journal Research in Reading

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Background: Prosodic reading is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. It is already known that English children develop their reading prosody from the earliest grades of primary school, showing the greatest improvement between first and second grade, but there are no Spanish studies of the development of reading prosody in the first years of school. Reading prosody may develop earlier in Spanish children as Spanish is a transparent language, which makes it possible to achieve high accuracy in the first year of learning to read. Method: We performed a longitudinal study, monitoring children from first to third grade. The children were asked to read aloud a text including declarative sentences containing high-frequency and low-frequency words and interrogative sentences; we analysed the usual prosodic variables (i.e., pauses, duration of different segments and pitch variations). Results: The results showed that younger readers made more and longer pauses and read less accurately. Moreover, the frequency words affected accuracy in all three grades, but only modified reading time in the first and second grades. We found no differences between the grades with respect to declarative sentences, but reading in all grades was influenced by word frequency, with a flatter final intonation. In the case of interrogative sentences, we found that first graders had a flatter melodic contour, whereas second graders tended to exaggerate the final change in intonation. Conclusions: Our results confirmed that reading fluency increases dramatically between first and second grade. Although Spanish has a transparent orthographic system, Spanish children seem to develop reading prosody similarly to children using opaque languages.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What This Paper Addsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What This Paper Addsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Development of reading prosody in school‐age Spanish children: a longitudinal study

Álvarez‐Cañizo

Martínez-García

Cuetos

et al. 2019

Journal Research in Reading

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“…Nevertheless, even in transparent orthographies, children also develop representations for intermediate units (Burani et al, 2002;Cuetos and Suárez-Coalla, 2009), and for whole words (Suárez-Coalla et al, 2016). It has been reported that several variables modulate orthographic storing, including, for example, syllable structure, context-dependent graphemes, and phonological or semantic knowledge of new words (Bowey, 1995;Walley et al, 2003;Ricketts et al, 2007;Wang et al, 2013;Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2018). The development of reading fluency therefore depends on many variables.…”

Section: Reading Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading in English as a Foreign Language by Spanish Children With Dyslexia

2020

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It has been reported that children with dyslexia have difficulties with learning a second language. The English alphabetic code is opaque, and it has been stated that deep orthographies cause important problems in children with dyslexia. Considering the strong differences between the Spanish and English orthographic systems, we predicted English reading problems in Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia. The current study focused on English as a foreign language in a group of 22 Spanish children with dyslexia (8-12 year olds), compared to a control group matched for age, gender, grade, and socioeconomic status. The objective was to identify the main difficulties that Spanish-speaking children with dyslexia demonstrate during English reading, to develop specific teaching programs. Participants were given four tasks related to reading: discrimination of phonemes, visual lexical decision, reading aloud, and oral vs. written semantic classification. The results suggest that children with dyslexia demonstrate problems in using English grapheme-phoneme rules, forcing them to employ a lexical strategy to read English words. However, they also showed difficulties in developing orthographic representations of words. Finally, they also exhibited problems with oral language, demonstrating difficulties accessing semantic information from an auditory presentation.

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“…Given that orthographic learning seems to be reflected in the accuracy and speed of reading (Álvarez‐Cañizo, Suárez‐Coalla, & Cuetos, submitted), it seems plausible that the formation of orthographic representations is critically influenced by syllable characteristics. Our goal, therefore, was to assess whether syllabic frequency and complexity influence orthographic learning in children with dyslexia.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Formation of Orthographic Representations in Spanish Dyslexic Children: The Role of Syllable Complexity and Frequency

Suárez‐Coalla

Cuetos

2017

Dyslexia

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Recent studies have suggested that Spanish children with dyslexia have difficulty storing orthographic representations of new words. But given that the syllable plays an important role in word recognition in Spanish, it is possible that the formation of orthographic representations is influenced by the characteristics of the syllables that make up the words. The objective of this study was to determine whether syllabic frequency and syllabic complexity influence orthographic learning in children with dyslexia. We compared the performance of a group of dyslexic children with that of a group of typical readers on a task that involved reading short and long pseudowords six times; we manipulated the frequency and complexity of the syllables from which the pseudowords were constructed. The results showed that dyslexic children do not benefit from syllabic simplicity or frequency when it comes to storing orthographic representations as the length effect in the dyslexic group remained was unchanged after repeated readings, regardless of stimulus characteristics. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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The role of sublexical variables in reading fluency development among Spanish children

Cited by 12 publications

References 48 publications

Development of reading prosody in school‐age Spanish children: a longitudinal study

Development of reading prosody in school‐age Spanish children: a longitudinal study

Reading in English as a Foreign Language by Spanish Children With Dyslexia

Formation of Orthographic Representations in Spanish Dyslexic Children: The Role of Syllable Complexity and Frequency

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