Assessment of Reading Precursors in Spanish-Speaking Children

Anibal Puente ^[1] ; Jesús M. Alvarado ^[2] ; Paz Fernández ^[2] ; Mónica Rosselli ^[3] ; Alfredo Ardila ^[4] ; Amelia Jiménez ^[2]
1. [1] Universidad Andrés Bello
  
  Universidad Andrés Bello
  
  Santiago, Chile
2. [2] Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  
  Universidad Complutense de Madrid
  
  Madrid, España
3. [3] Florida Atlantic University
  
  Florida Atlantic University
  
  Estados Unidos
4. [4] Florida International University
  
  Florida International University
  
  Estados Unidos
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Localización: The Spanish Journal of Psychology, ISSN 1138-7416, Vol. 19, 2016, 12 págs.
Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
- 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).