Visual and phonological determinants of misreadings in a transparent orthography

Abstract

Growth of word reading skills was examined in first and second year Italian school children by analysis of the pattern of reading errors. The study was designed to investigate the role of visual vs phonological similarities as causes of misreadings in a transparent orthography. The selection of reading material was tailored to permit a meaningful cross-language comparison with pre-existing findings on English-speaking children. The results showed that, in Italian as in English, spatially-related errors (such as confusingb andd) constituted a minor proportion of the total errors. Errors on vowel and consonant letters that are not spatially confusable accounted for the greater proportion of the total. Moreover, the co-occurrence of spatial and phonological confusability resulted in appreciably more errors than when either occurred without the other. Vowel position in the syllable had no systematic effect on errors. In beginning readers of Italian, consonant errors outnumbered vowel errors by a wide margin; the reverse pattern was found in previous studies on English-speaking children at the same level of schooling. It is proposed that differences between Italian and English in the phonological structure of the lexicon and in the consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspondences account in large part for the differences in quantity and distribution of the errors.