VISUAL AND PHONOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF MISREADINGS IN A TRANSPARENT ORTHOGRAPHY

Growth of word reading skills was examined in first and second year It alian school children by analysis of the pattern of reading errors. Th e study was designed to investigate the role of visual vs phonological similarities as causes of misreadings in a transparent orthography. T he selection of reading material was tailored to permit a meaningful c ross-language comparison with pre-existing findings on English-speakin g children. The results showed that, in Italian as in English, spatial ly-related errors (such as confusing b and d) constituted a minor prop ortion 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 con fusability resulted in appreciably more errors than when either occurr ed without the other. Vowel position in the syllable had no systematic effect on errors. In beginning readers of Italian, consonant errors o utnumbered vowel errors by a wide margin; the reverse pattern was foun d in previous studies on English-speaking children at the same level o f schooling. It is proposed that differences between Italian and Engli sh in the phonological structure of the lexicon and in the consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspondences account in large part for the dif ferences in quantity and distribution of the errors.