Assessment of Reading Precursors in Spanish-Speaking Children

Span J Psychol. 2016 Nov 24:19:E85. doi: 10.1017/sjp.2016.92.

Abstract

This study's purpose was to analyse basic reading processes in different age groups of Spanish-speaking children using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and regression analysis. Two hundred forty-five children (aged 4 years and 9 months, to 9 years and 7 months; 120 boys, 125 girls), native Spanish-speakers, were selected from schools in Madrid. All participants were in either their last year of preschool or the first three years of elementary school, depending on their age. Nine classic reading tasks were created and administered to measure three reading skills: word recognition, phonological awareness, and reading comprehension. The results of the CFA show that data fit to proposed model with a general reading factor based on these three reading skills χ2(27) = 29.03, p = .36, RMSEA = .02, 90% CIs [.0, .05], CFI = 1.0. The word recognition skills were the best at describing reading performance in preschool children (R 2 = .51 for word identification task); phonological awareness, especially rhyme identification task, discriminated well until second grade (R 2 = .60); and finally, reading comprehension, basically phrase completion task, were the best measure of reading performance in third grade (R 2 = .45).

Keywords: Spanish language; phonological awareness; reading comprehension; word recognition.

MeSH terms

  • Child
  • Child Development / physiology*
  • Child, Preschool
  • Comprehension / physiology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Language Tests
  • Language*
  • Male
  • Pattern Recognition, Visual / physiology*
  • Reading*
  • Spain