Costs and benefits of orthographic inconsistency in reading:evidence from a cross-linguistic comparison

We compared reading acquisition in English and Italian children up to late primary school analyzing RTs and errors as a function of various psycholinguistic variables and changes due to experience. Our results show that reading becomes progressively more reliant on larger processing units with age, but that this is modulated by consistency of the language. In English, an inconsistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs earlier on and it is demonstrated by faster RTs, a stronger effect of lexical variables and lack of length effect (by fifth grade). However, not all English children are able to master this mode of processing yielding larger inter-individual variability. In Italian, a consistent orthography, reliance on larger units occurs later and it is less pronounced. This is demonstrated by larger length effects which remain significant even in older children and by larger effects of a global factor (related to speed of orthographic decoding) explaining changes of performance across ages. Our results show the importance of considering not only overall performance, but inter-individual variability and variability between conditions when interpreting cross-linguistic differences

Competência ortográfica e metafonológica: influências e correlações na leitura e escrita de escolares da 4ª série Orthographic and metaphonological competences: influences and correlations with reading and writing abilities of 4th grade students

OBJETIVO: Estudar o desempenho de escolares da 4ª série em tarefas de leitura e escrita e de consciência fonológica. MÉTODOS: Trinta e dois escolares de 4ª série (50,0% meninas), entre nove e 11 anos, foram avaliados segundo os procedimentos: anamnese, avaliação da leitura, escrita (54 itens linguísticos) e consciência fonológica. Foram divididos em: GPI: escreveram e, após, leram em voz alta; GPII: leram em voz alta e, após, escreveram; GCI: apenas escreveram; GCII: apenas leram. RESULTADOS: Na escrita, GPII apresentou as maiores médias de acerto, sendo que GPI, GPII e GCI apresentaram melhor desempenho para as palavras frequentes, seguido das pseudopalavras e das de baixa frequência. Na leitura, os desempenhos dos GPI, GPII e GCII foram semelhantes, sendo que GPI e GPII apresentaram mais acertos para as pseudopalavras, seguido das de alta frequência. A correlação entre consciência fonológica e escrita mostrou-se moderada e entre consciência fonológica e leitura e entre escrita e leitura foi bem fraca. CONCLUSÕES: A consciência fonológica mostrou moderada correlação com a escrita e baixa com a leitura; a característica psicolinguística baixa familiaridade determinou as maiores médias de erro, tanto na leitura quanto na escrita.<br>PURPOSE: To study the performance of 4th grade students on reading, writing and phonological awareness tasks. METHODS: Thirty-two 4th grade children (50% of each gender), with ages between nine and 11 years, were evaluated according to the following procedure: anamnesis, reading and writing task (54 linguistic tokens), and phonological awareness task. The students were divided into two research groups and two comparison groups: GPI: carried out the writing task first, and then the reading task; GPII: completed the reading, followed by the writing task; GCI: completed only the writing items; GCII: completed only the reading items. RESULTS: In the writing task, GPII showed the highest rates of correct answers, and GPI, GPII and GCI had better performances in writing high frequency words, followed by pseudowords and low frequency words. The reading evaluation showed that the performances of GPI, GPII and GCII were similar, and GPI and GPII had more correct answers for pseudowords, followed by high frequency words. The correlation between phonological awareness and writing was moderate, while correlations between phonological awareness and reading, and writing and reading were very weak. CONCLUSION: Phonological awareness was moderately correlated to the performance on the writing task, and weakly correlated to the performance on the reading task. The psycholinguistic feature low familiarity determined the highest error averages, both in reading and writing tasks