Understanding factors that influence reading achievement among bilingual children is considerably more complex than it is for monolingual children. Research on dual language development indicates that bilingual children's oral language abilities are often distributed across languages in varied ways, due to heterogeneity of dual language exposure…

In transparent orthographic systems, the main characteristic of developmental dyslexia is poor reading fluency. Several studies have reported that children with dyslexia have difficulties forming orthographic representations of words, which hampers good reading fluency. This study aimed at evaluating whether the semantic-phonological training…

The ability to encode (spell) is an integral writing skill needed to communicate effectively. The ability to spell, also, enhances decoding as spelling and decoding are reciprocal skills that rely on knowledge of the same subskills. Spelling can also be particularly difficult for students with literacy and phonological-processing difficulties such…

Reading becomes expressive when word and text reading are quick, accurate and automatic. Recent studies have reported that skilled readers use greater pitch changes and fewer irrelevant pauses than poor readers. Given that developmental dyslexics have difficulty acquiring and automating the alphabetic code and developing orthographic…

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…

Reading fluency is one of the basic processes of learning to read. Children begin to develop fluency when they are able to form orthographic representations of words, which provide direct, smooth, and fast reading. Dyslexic children of transparent orthographic systems are mainly characterized by poor reading fluency (Cuetos & Suárez-Coalla…

The present study investigated knowledge, misconceptions, and lack of information about dyslexia among pre-service (PST) and in-service (IST) Spanish-speaking teachers in Spain and Peru. Two hundred and forty-six pre-service teachers and 267 in-service teachers completed the Knowledge and Beliefs about Developmental Dyslexia Scale (KBDDS).…

Cross-linguistic studies suggest that the orthographic system determines the reading performance of dyslexic children. In opaque orthographies, the fundamental feature of developmental dyslexia is difficulty in reading accuracy, whereas slower reading speed is more common in transparent orthographies. The aim of the current study was to examine…

This study was intended to help clarify the nature of dyslexia in Spanish. A sample of 30 children, 8 to 16 years old, participated in this study. Dyslexic children were compared to two control groups, a chronological age-matched control group and a reading level-matched control group. Measures included nonword and pseudohomophone reading…

Spanish-speaking children learn to read words printed in a relatively transparent orthography. Variation in orthographic transparency may shape the architecture of the reading system and also the manifestation of reading difficulties. We tested normally developing children and children diagnosed with reading difficulties. Reading accuracy was high…

This study investigated the ability of the English and Spanish versions of the "Get Ready to Read!" Screener (E-GRTR and S-GRTR) administered at the beginning of the preschool year to predict the oral language and phonological and print processing skills of Spanish-speaking English-language learners (ELLs) and English-only speaking children (EO)…

Phonological awareness (PA), phonological memory (PM), and phonological access to lexical storage (also known as RAN), play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPAs) in 147 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children whose native language was…

Fifty-four students were tested at specific time intervals over 10 years to determine best native language (NL) predictors of oral and written foreign language (FL) proficiency and FL aptitude. All participants completed two years of Spanish, French, or German. Each was administered measures of NL literacy, oral language, and cognitive ability in…