Learning to Read in Spanish: Contributions of Phonological Awareness, Orthographic Coding, and Rapid Naming

Abstract

During the past 2 decades, many respective reading processes have been delineated, and much is now known about reading acquisition in children. Most of this research has been completed using English-dominant subjects. As such, the literature focuses on an opaque orthography and aspects of learning to read in this context. In this study, predictors of early reading acquisition in a highly transparent language were researched. Phonological awareness, orthographic coding, and rapid naming tasks were administered to 57 native Spanish-speaking kindergarten children living in Colombia. Correlational analyses showed moderate relationships between all skills tasks and word reading and reading comprehension. Regression analyses showed that orthographic coding best predicted word and nonword reading, whereas naming tasks best predicted reading comprehension, although all measures were highly intercorrelated. Findings suggest that school psychologists must differently conceptualize assessment when working with Spanish language students because highly informative measures of English reading are not as relevant in Spanish.