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Reading difficulties of children growing up in poverty contexts have not received as much attention as those of children from middle-income families. This paper analyzes the reading-related cognitive profiles of Argentine, Spanish-speaking, low-SES children with reading difficulties (RD), by comparing them with chronological age- (CA) and reading age- (RA) matched children from the same socioeconomic background. Ninety children (30 in each group) participated in the study. Testing included reading, spelling, verbal memory, phonological sensitivity, rapid naming, letter knowledge, and vocabulary measures. Results showed that children from the RD group performed significantly worse than their same-age peers. These findings would suggest the presence of a cognitive vulnerability in children with reading difficulties. Interestingly, when compared with children from the RA-matched control group, children in the RD group only obtained significantly lower scores in phoneme segmentation and letter-sound recognition tasks. Cognitive profiles of low-income children growing in poverty differ from cognitive profiles described for middle-income children with dyslexia. Given that teaching of letter sounds is not included in Argentina's mandatory curriculum, it is possible that letter-sound teaching constitutes an environmental factor that interacts with other risk factors to produce reading difficulties in poverty contexts.

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Copyright of Avances en PsicologÍa Latinoamericana is the property of Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Senora del Rosario and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Share (1999; 2004; 2008; 2011) has indicated that the phonological recoding of words constitutes a self-teaching mechanism that fosters the development of orthographic representations. However, several studies have suggested that some characteristics of grapheme-phoneme correspondences might constitute an obstacle for this process. This paper aims to explore whether those graphemes which may correspond to more than one phoneme (that is, graphemes with two possible phonological translations in Spanish, such as as either /j/ or /gu/) or graphemes with a very low frequency relative to homophone graphemes ( being ten times less frequent than ) hinder the establishment of orthographic representations in Spanish. Thus, 54 children attending 3rd. grade phonologically recoded pseudowords with and without this kind of graphemes. After training sessions, children were post-tested with a lexical decision task and a spelling to dictation task in order to evaluate whether they had been able to store the orthographic representations of the pseudowords they had read. Results showed that children tended to make significantly more mistakes in the post-test when the pseudowords contained ambiguous graphemes or graphemes with relatively low frequency than in pseudowords that did not include such graphemes. These results suggest that phonological ambiguity of graphemes and low frequency respective to homophone graphemes have a negative impact on children's ability to form orthographic representations in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]