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Prosodic awareness skills and literacy acquisition in Spanish
Sylvia Defior1, Nicolás Gutiérrez-Palma, María José Cano-Marín
1Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Granada, 18071 Granada, Spain. sdefior@ugr.es
Abstract:
There has been very little research in Spanish on the potential role of prosodic skills in reading and spelling acquisition, which is the subject of the present study. A total of 85 children in 5th year of Primary Education (mean age 10 years and 9 months) performed tests assessing memory, stress awareness, phonological awareness, reading and spelling. In written language tests, errors were classified as phonological (grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules) or stress-related (placement of the stress mark). Regression analyses showed that, once memory and phonological awareness were controlled, stress awareness partially explained reading and spelling performance as well as error type; however, differences were found between reading and spelling errors. These results show a relationship between prosodic skills--namely stress sensitivity--and the acquisition of reading and spelling skills that seems to be independent of phonological awareness skills.
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