PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS, SPELLING AND READING ABILITIES IN SPANISH-SPEAKING CHILDREN

The relationship between phonological awareness, spelling and reading abilities was studied comparing first grade (N=39) Spanish-speaking skilled and less skilled readers' performance on three measures: pheneme segmentation, word spelling and word reading. Results showed that skilled readers performed at ceiling on the three tasks, whereas less skilled readers had a better performance on spelling than on reading, and most of them reached segmentation criterion in the phonological awareness task. Performance on this task was significantly correlated with word spelling, while no association was found between phoneme segmentation and word reading. The less skilled readers could spell many words they could not read, and children in both groups spelled most of the words in a conventional way. It is agreed that certain characteristics of Spanish phonetic structure - small number of vowels, simple syllabic structure - and the relative transparency of its orthography may account for the early development of phenemic segmentation skills and allow the mastery of sound-letter correspondence rules that is reflected in good spelling performance.