THE INFLUENCE OF LEXICAL AND SUBLEXICAL VARIABLES IN NORMAL AND POOR SPANISH READERS

The main aim of our study was to find out the effect of several lexica l and sublexical variables (lexical category, lexical frequency, sylla bic structure, and word length) in the acquisition of reading in a tra nsparent language such as Spanish. The second goal of our study was th e comparison of the effect of these variables in normal and poor Spani sh readers. One hundred and forty children (aged between 6 and 12), tw enty of whom were poor readers, were tested using a reading test of 30 6 items in which we balanced all the variables. The dependent variable was the percentage of correct responses in a decontextualized word re ading test. Our results showed that all the above mentioned variables produced a significant effect on the number of errors made by the chil dren. This pattern of results suggests no difference between the proce sses involved in the reading acquisition of Spanish and those implicat ed in deep orthographies such as English. Our results also showed no q ualitative differences between normal and poor readers. The four varia bles studied showed the same behaviour in their effect on reading perf ormance for both normal and poor readers, indicating that poor readers also use both the lexical and the phonological route. Our data sugges t the universality of the dual route model, independent of the transpa rency or opaqueness of the different alphabetical languages.