Reading acquisition involves connections between the spoken language and the writing system. The English-language writing system holds an inconsistent alphabetic system, thus encouraging readers to develop representations between the grapheme and the word. Reading in English as a Foreign language supposes a challenge, especially when the reader's…

Purpose: Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds. Method: Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a…

Over the last few years, we have witnessed a growing interest in computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) tools and the commercial success of foreign language teaching applications that incorporate speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition technologies. However, empirical evidence supporting the pedagogical effectiveness of these…

Spanish native speakers are known to pronounce onset /sC/ clusters in English with a prothetic vowel, as in "esport" for sport, due to their native language phonotactic constraints. We assessed whether accurate production of e.g. "spi" instead of "espi" was related to accurate perceptual discrimination of this…

The main objectives of this study were to examine the type of adaptations made by Grades 1 through 3 primary school teachers working with children who are poor spellers of a transparent language such as Spanish and to analyze whether these adaptations were determined by the grade taught by these teachers. Using the total population of primary…

The main goal of the present study was to examine the efficacy of a multi-component programme to improve reading fluency and text comprehension in Spanish children with reading disabilities (RD). Special needs teachers were trained in the application of the programme, which included repeated reading plus phonological awareness training and…

This study examined effects of intrasyllabic units on lexical decision performance in 15 normal reading (NR) children and 15 children with reading disabilities (RD) in a transparent orthography (Spanish). Findings suggest that Spanish children with RD do not use correspondences based on higher level units (onsets and rimes) in visual word…

Compares the phonetically regular orthography of Spanish with the phonetic inconsistencies of English. Reports on the role of phonics in six popular Spanish reading programs. Notes that the regularity of the Spanish language is compatible with the use of systematic phonics for reading instruction. (MM)

Evidence of phonological awareness levels usually comes from English-speaking children. The evidence in Spanish is scarce. The present study examined the phonological awareness of syllables, onsets--rimes, and phonemes, extending the Treiman and Zukowski (1991) results to preliterate and literate Spanish-speaking children. The sample comprised…