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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.

This study investigated which components of the writing production process are impaired in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia (DD) aged 8 to 12 years. Children with and without dyslexia (n = 60) were assessed in their use of the lexical and the sublexical routes of spelling as well as the orthographic working memory system by manipulating lexical frequency, phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency, and word length in a copying task and a spelling-to-dictation task. Results revealed that children with dyslexia produced longer written latencies than chronological age-matched (CA) controls, more errors than CA and reading age-matched (RA) controls, and writing durations similar to CA controls. Latencies were more affected by frequency, consistency, and length in the DD group and the RA group than in CA controls. Children in the DD and RA groups produced longer written latencies in the copying than in the spelling-to-dictation task, while controls in the CA group were not affected by the task. Results indicate that spelling impairments in Spanish children with dyslexia affect the relative involvement of lexical and sublexical information during handwriting. Meanwhile, effects on writing speed seem to be related to deficits in reading ability, and accuracy scores seem to be poorer than expected by children's reading skill.

Orthographic learning is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. There are different variables that could influence the formation of orthographic representations. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the previous semantic and phonological knowledge on the formation of orthographic representations. We used a decrease of the length effect as the measure of orthographic learning. We made a reading aloud task that utilised new words with Spanish children from third grade under three different conditions: with prior semantic and phonological training, with prior phonological training and without training. Results showed that knowing the meaning and the phonological form of the words facilitated the formation of orthographic representations, as the length effect was significantly lower than in the other conditions, and it also improved the children's reading performance.

Recent studies show that dyslexia persists into adulthood, even in highly educated and well-read people. The main characteristic that adults with dyslexia present is a low speed when reading. In Spanish, a shallow orthographic system, no studies about adults with dyslexia are available; and it is possible that the consistency of the orthographic system favours the reading fluency. The aim of this study was to get an insight of the reading characteristics of Spanish adults with dyslexia and also to infer the reading strategies that they are using. For that purpose, a group of 30 dyslexics (M age?=?32 years old) and an age-matched group of 30 adults without reading disabilities completed several phonological and reading tasks: phonological awareness tasks, rapid automatic naming, lexical decision, word and pseudoword reading, letter detection and text reading. The results showed that highly educated Spanish dyslexics performed significantly worse than the control group in the majority of the tasks. Specifically, they showed difficulties reading long pseudowords, indicating problems in automating the grapheme-phoneme rules, but they also seem to present difficulties reading words, which indicate problems with the lexical route. It seems that the Spanish dyslexic adults, as in deep orthographies, continue having difficulties in phonological awareness tasks, rapid naming and reading.

Word age-of-acquisition (AoA) affects reading. The mapping hypothesis predicts AoA effects when input--output mappings are arbitrary. In Spanish, the orthography-to-phonology mappings required for word naming are consistent; therefore, no AoA effects are expected. Nevertheless, AoA effects have been found, motivating the present investigation of how AoA can affect reading in Spanish. Four experiments were run to examine reading with a factorial design manipulating AoA and frequency. In Experiments 1 and 2 (immediate and speeded naming), only word frequency affected word naming. In Experiment 3 (lexical decision), both AoA and frequency affected word recognition. In Experiment 4 (immediate naming with highly imageable items), both frequency and AoA affected naming. The results suggest that highly imageable items induce a larger reliance on semantics in reading aloud. Such reliance causes faster naming of earlier acquired words because the corresponding concepts have richer visual and sensory features acquired mainly through direct sensory experience.

The relationship between written words and their pronunciation varies considerably among different orthographic systems, and these variations have repercussions on learning to read. Children whose languages have deep orthographies must learn to pronounce larger units, such as rhymes, morphemes, or whole words, to achieve the correct pronunciation of some words. However, children whose languages have transparent orthographies need only learn to pronounce graphemes to be able to read any word. In this study, the reading evolution of Spanish-speaking children was investigated for the purpose of discovering when and for what types of stimuli lexical information is used in Spanish. Five- to 10-year-old children were presented with lists of stimuli in which lexicality, frequency, and length were manipulated. The results in terms of reading accuracy and speed showed that the influence of stimulus length is great in the early grades and later diminishes, and just the opposite is the case for lexicality and frequency. These data suggest that reading acquisition in Spanish constitutes a continuum that ranges from phonological recoding to the use of lexical strategies, and that this transition is made at a very early stage, at least for the most frequent words.

In a series of 4 experiments, the authors show that phonological repair mechanisms, known to operate in the auditory modality, are directly translated in the visual modality. This holds with the provision that printed stimuli are presented for a very brief duration and that the effect of phonological repair is tested after a delay of some 100 ms has elapsed after that presentation. The case of phonological repair chosen to exemplify the parallelism between print and speech is the prosthesis of /e/ in utterances beginning with /s/ followed by a consonant in Spanish. Native speakers of Spanish hear a prothetic /e/ in auditorily presented pseudowords such as special (/spe[theta]jal/, derived from "especial") as well as stuto (/stuto/, derived from "astuto"). It is shown here that they also hear that same vowel /e/ when presented with the printed pseudowords "special" and "stuto." This finding of a phonological repair effect in print has implications for the issue of phonological activation from print, as well as for the prelexical locus and mandatory nature of phonological repair mechanisms in general.

Orthographic learning is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. There are different variables that could influence the formation of orthographic representations. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the previous semantic and phonological knowledge on the formation of orthographic representations. We used a decrease of the length effect as the measure of orthographic learning. We made a reading aloud task that utilised new words with Spanish children from third grade under three different conditions: with prior semantic and phonological training, with prior phonological training and without training. Results showed that knowing the meaning and the phonological form of the words facilitated the formation of orthographic representations, as the length effect was significantly lower than in the other conditions, and it also improved the children's reading performance. Highlights: What is already known about this topicSpanish children from primary education form orthographic representations after approximately six exposures to new words.Phonological previous knowledge facilitates the formation of orthographic representations in children and adults from a transparent or an opaque language.Semantic previous knowledge of words seems to only facilitate the orthographic learning in adults from a transparent language. What this paper addsSemantic and phonological prior training and only phonological prior training increase reading speed.Semantic and phonological previous knowledge makes easier to form orthographic representations in Spanish children, with a transparent orthographic system. Implications for theory, policy or practiceMore knowledge about how children from a transparent language form orthographic representations of new words.Relevance of oral vocabulary (i.e., meaning and phonological form of words) in reading performance.Importance of this previous knowledge on the orthographic learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading impairment is an important feature in Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). The Spanish orthography entails completely regular spelling to sound correspondences, so reading disorders may be different to English. In the current study, reading, phonological and semantic abilities of 35 patients with the three variants of PPA, and 13 healthy volunteers were assessed. Brain metabolism was concomitantly obtained from each participant using 18 F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography imaging. Two main patterns of impairment were identified: difficulties in nonwords reading with preservation of exception words in agrammatic and logopenic aphasia, and the inverse pattern in semantic dementia. Left frontal and left parietotemporal regions were associated to nonwords reading, while the anterior temporal lobe was related to reading of exception words. These results support the usefulness of examining reading abilities in the differential diagnosis of PPA variants, and suggest potential types of words that could be used in Spanish to assess these patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orthographic representations of words are indispensable for reading fluency. The ways in which these representations are developed and their resistance to decay are hotly debated topics. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of semantic and phonological representations on the formation of orthographic representations in a transparent orthography. In order to achieve this objective, an experiment with three conditions was carried out. In the first condition, a group of university students were asked to repeatedly read 10 new words after semantic and phonological training, in the second condition another group of participants read the new words after phonological training, and in the third condition participants read without previous training. Finally, a follow-up session was performed to test the resistance to decay of the orthographic representations. The results showed that participants who had received semantic training formed the representations faster than participants in the other conditions, as indicated by the decrease in length effect. These results indicate the important role of previous knowledge when people face new written words. A month later these orthographic representations still remained in the lexicon of the participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Introduction: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is associated with dopamine depletion in the fronto-striatal network which affects some language aspects such as verb processing. Some experiments have demonstrated that dopamine deficiency plays a role in the normal functioning of the lexico-semantic system. As a result, the verbal fluency task could be a useful tool to assess the function of the semantic system, by examining both the number of words generated and the frequency of use of those words. Objective: The aim of this study was to find out how dopamine affects the performance of PD patients using a verbal fluency task, focussing on action-word fluency. Method: A group of 20 PD patients and 20 controls participated in the study. Participants were assessed with four different verbal fluency tasks: phonological, semantic (animal and supermarket words) and action fluency. PD patients were tested twice (on/off medication) and controls only once. Results: For the number of words, there were significant differences between PD patients on and off medication in the phonological and action fluency tasks. Compared to controls, PD off medication produced significantly fewer words in phonological, and actions. Regarding frequency, differences were found between PD patients off medication and controls for the action-word category. Discussion: Our data showed a specific deficit in PD patients off medication in categories mainly depending on frontal lobe function (phonological and actions) while these differences were restored with dopamine treatment. Moreover, PD patients off medication produced higher frequency verbs than controls, suggesting that dopamine affects the normal functioning within the lexico-semantic network of verbs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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Readers and writers of Spanish use an orthography that is highly transparent. It has been proposed that readers of Spanish can rely on grapheme-phoneme correspondences, alone, to access meaning or phonology from print. In recent years, a number of case studies have yielded evidence inconsistent with this idea. We review these studies with particular focus on those that report evidence for reading based on direct lexical mappings between print, orthographic representations, and meaning or phonology. We report a new case of acquired literacy impairment in Spanish, MJ, who presents a pattern of preserved abilities and deficits symptomatic of deep dyslexia. The patient is unable to read nonwords, but can read a substantial number of words. Her reading is characterized by the production of semantic, visual, and derivational errors. We argue that MJ has a deficit in her lexical selection ability, common to both her reading and her naming problems. We propose that MJ, and the other cases we review, demonstrate that lexical reading is adopted by skilled readers even in a transparent language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acquisition of new vocabulary is usually mediated by previous experience with language. In the visual domain, the representation of orthographically unfamiliar words at the phonological or conceptual levels may facilitate their orthographic learning. The neural correlates of this advantage were investigated by recording EEG activity during reading novel and familiar words across three different experiments (n = 22 each), manipulating the availability of previous knowledge on the novel written words. A different pattern of event-related potential (ERP) responses was found depending on the previous training, resembling cross-level top-down interactive effects during vocabulary acquisition. Thus, whereas previous phonological experience caused a modulation at the post-lexical stages of the visual recognition of novel written words (~520 ms), additional semantic training influenced their processing at a lexico-semantic stage (~320 ms). Moreover, early lexical differences (~180 ms) elicited in the absence of previous training did not emerge after both phonological and semantic training, reflecting similar orthographic processing and word-form access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

La posibilidad de predecir el aprendizaje de la lectura y la escritura ha sido objeto de numerosas investigaciones. Las habilidades de procesamiento fonológico y velocidad de denominación aparecen entre los mejores predictores en la mayor parte de los estudios. Sin embargo, muchos de los resultados se han obtenido en lenguas diferentes del castellano y con estudios que evalúan esas capacidades cuando los niños ya saben leer, por tanto la relación de la lectura y escritura con otras habilidades podría ser fruto del aprendizaje. El objetivo de este estudio fue determinar qué variables permiten predecir la adquisición de la lectura mecánica, así como de la escritura, en castellano. Se aplicaron tareas de conciencia fonémica, repetición de pseudopalabras, amplitud de memoria, fluidez verbal y denominación rápida y automatizada, a un grupo de 50 niños prelectores. Dieciocho meses después, cuando ya sabían leer y escribir, se les evaluó en lectura y escritura. Con los datos obtenidos, se realizaron análisis de correlación de Pearson, análisis factorial y análisis de regresión lineal. La conciencia fonológica fue la variable que mejor predijo la exactitud lectora y la escritura, mientras que la denominación rápida de dibujos predijo la velocidad lectora. Estos datos indican que es posible pronosticar la adquisición de la lectura y escritura antes de su enseñanza. Así mismo, nos sugieren que es posible intervenir tempranamente, especialmente en aquellos niños que presenten riesgo de dificultades de aprendizaje.The prediction of reading and writing acquisition has been the subject of numerous research studies, given the importance of the issue. Phonological processing skills and rapid automatic naming are among the best predictors in most research studies. However, many of the results have been obtained in languages other than Spanish, and from studies that assess these skills in children who are already readers. Therefore, the relationship between reading and writing and other skills could be the result of learning these skills. The aim of this study was to identify variables that predict the acquisition of mechanical reading and writing in Spanish. A group of 50 pre-reading children participated in different tasks (phonemic awareness, pseudoword repetition, memory span, verbal fluency and Rapid Automatic Naming), and eighteen months later, when they could read and write, literacy skills were evaluated. Pearson correlations, factor analysis, and linear regression analysis were carried out on the data. Phonological awareness was the variable that best predicted reading accuracy and writing, while rapid automatized naming of pictures predicted reading speed. These data indicate that it is possible to predict the acquisition of reading and writing skills before they are taught. Furthermore, these results suggest that early intervention is possible, especially in those children who are at risk of learning difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a series of 4 experiments, the authors show that phonological repair mechanisms, known to operate in the auditory modality, are directly translated in the visual modality. This holds with the provision that printed stimuli are presented for a very brief duration and that the effect of phonological repair is tested after a delay of some 100 ms has elapsed after that presentation. The case of phonological repair chosen to exemplify the parallelism between print and speech is the prosthesis of /e/ in utterances beginning with /s/ followed by a consonant in Spanish. Native speakers of Spanish hear a prothetic /e/ in auditorily presented pseudowords such as special (/speθjal/, derived from "especial") as well as stuto (/stuto/, derived from "astuto"). It is shown here that they also hear that same vowel /e/ when presented with the printed pseudowords "special" and "stuto." This finding of a phonological repair effect in print has implications for the issue of phonological activation from print, as well as for the prelexical locus and mandatory nature of phonological repair mechanisms in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Behavioral measures in visual priming tasks show opposite effects for syllables and morphemes, which indicate that they are processed by two independent systems. We used event related potentials (ERPs) to explore two priming situations in Spanish: prefix related words (reacción-REFORMA [reaction-reform]), in which prime and target words shared a first syllable that was also a prefix, and syllable related words (regalo-REFORMA [gift-reform.]), in which the shared first syllable was a pseudoprefix in the prime word. Prefix related pairs, unlike syllable related pairs, evoked a very early positivity in reaction to the target (at 150–250ms window), suggesting that the prefix information is immediately available, at a prelexical stage. By contrast, syllable related pairs showed a larger N400 effect. This late negativity may be caused by lateral inhibition among lexical candidates activated in the lexicon by the prime''s first syllable. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]