Formación de representaciones ortográficas en niños: incidencia de la ambigüedad fonológica y de la frecuencia relativa de los grafemas.

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 <G> as either /j/ or /gu/) or graphemes with a very low frequency relative to homophone graphemes (<Z> being ten times less frequent than <S>) 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]