English reading performance by Spanish speaking children: A phonologically or semantically mediated pathway?.

Abstract

Abstract Reading acquisition involves connections between the spoken language and the writ ing system. The English-language writing system holds an inconsistent alphabetic system, thus encouraging readers to develop representations between the grapheme and the word. Reading in English as a Foreign language supposes a challenge, espe cially when the reader’s native language is consistent and learners live in a mono lingual context, as is the case in Spain. This may cause difculties in learning the grapheme-phoneme-conversion-rules and using diferent grain size units. The aim of this study was to address the reading strategies that Spanish children use when reading in English. We considered the infuence of word length, lexical frequency, orthographic consistency (in onset, nucleus, coda, and rime), and semantic knowl edge on word reading. We analyzed speed and accuracy in a reading aloud task of English words from 94 Spanish-speaking children (fourth, ffth and sixth grade). Participants also completed a translation task into Spanish taken from the previous English ones. Results showed the infuence of word length in accuracy, as well as that of children’s grade, onset consistency, and semantic knowledge on both accu racy and reading speed. Regarding sublexical units, onset reading accuracy was determined by onset consistency in all grades; nucleus accuracy was determined by rime consistency only in the sixth grade and coda accuracy by rime consistency in the ffth and sixth grades. The present study demonstrates the relevance of Spanish children’s semantic knowledge when reading in English. Despite this, and in line with the statistical learning perspective, some regularities are used in correlation with greater reading experience in English.