Early literacy skills serve as the best precursors of reading success and risk indicators of the double deficit and triple deficit hypotheses according to the spelling consistency of languages. Our study analyzes the predictive value of phonological awareness, naming speed, and orthographic skills for early reading in Spanish. Participants…

The main objective of this study was to analyze what writing measures, or combination of measures, would be most appropriate for early detection of students at risk of presenting future difficulties in learning to write in Spanish, in terms of tasks, scoring indices (dependent, independent and accurate-precision) and duration. A sample of 231…

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…

This study explores the different uses of the word "little," its equivalents in Spanish and its teaching to young Spanish learners. First, it aims at analyzing the lexico-grammatical behavior of "little" in a corpus of children's short stories, where its prevailing use, preceding countable nouns, has been found to be much more…

Background: Children with a diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI) present impaired oral comprehension. According to the simple view of reading, general amodal linguistic capacity accounts for both oral and reading comprehension. Considering this, we should expect SLI children to display a reading comprehension deficit. However, previous…

The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently…

Background: It is generally assumed that children with Down syndrome (DS) present a deficit in lexical production relative to their cognitive abilities. However, the literature on this topic has recently shown several contradictory results. In addition, most studies only consider vocabulary production in its vocal modality. However it is also…

This paper describes early language development in a deaf Spanish child fitted with a cochlear implant (CI) when she was 1 year 6 months old. The girl had been exposed to Cued Speech (CS) since that age. The main aim of the research was to identify potential areas of slow language development as well as the potential benefit of CI and CS. At the…

Introduction: Stress in Spanish is associated with an orthographic mark that indicates stress, but there are also other clues that point to it. Most words have the same stress (on the penultimate syllable), and closed syllables (syllables ending in a consonant) attract the stress. In this paper we study these clues, and consequently the function…