Assessment of Reading Precursors in Spanish-Speaking Children

  1. Anibal Puente 1
  2. Jesús M. Alvarado 2
  3. Paz Fernández 2
  4. Mónica Rosselli 3
  5. Alfredo Ardila 4
  6. Amelia Jiménez 2
  1. 1 Universidad Andrés Bello
    info

    Universidad Andrés Bello

    Santiago de Chile, Chile

    ROR https://ror.org/01qq57711

  2. 2 Universidad Complutense de Madrid
    info

    Universidad Complutense de Madrid

    Madrid, España

    ROR 02p0gd045

  3. 3 Florida Atlantic University
    info

    Florida Atlantic University

    Boca de Ratones, Estados Unidos

    ROR https://ror.org/05p8w6387

  4. 4 Florida International University
    info

    Florida International University

    Miami, Estados Unidos

    ROR https://ror.org/02gz6gg07

Journal:
The Spanish Journal of Psychology

ISSN: 1138-7416

Year of publication: 2016

Volume: 19

Type: Article

DOI: 10.1017/SJP.2016.92 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openOpen access editor

More publications in: The Spanish Journal of Psychology

Sustainable development goals

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 (R2 = .51 for word identification task); phonological awareness, especially rhyme identification task, discriminated well until second grade (R2 = .60); and finally, reading comprehension, basically phrase completion task, were the best measure of reading performance in third grade (R2 = .45).

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