Annals of Dyslexia

, Volume 62, Issue 3, pp 137–152 | Cite as

Reading difficulties in Albanian

Article
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Abstract

Albanian is an Indo-European language with a shallow orthography, in which there is an absolute correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. We aimed to know reading strategies used by Albanian disabled children during word and pseudoword reading. A pool of 114 Kosovar reading disabled children matched with 150 normal readers aged 6 to 11 years old were tested. They had to read 120 stimuli varied in lexicality, frequency, and length. The results in terms of reading accuracy as well as in reading times show that both groups were affected by lexicality and length effects. In both groups, length and lexicality effects were significantly modulated by school year being greater in early grades and later diminish in length and just the opposite in lexicality. However, the reading difficulties group was less accurate and slower than the control group across all school grades. Analyses of the error patterns showed that phonological errors, when the letter replacement leading to new nonwords, are the most common error type in both groups, although as grade rises, visual errors and lexicalizations increased more in the control group than the reading difficulties group. These findings suggest that Albanian normal children use both routes (lexical and sublexical) from the beginning of reading despite of the complete regularity of Albanian, while children with reading difficulties start using sublexical reading and the lexical reading takes more time to acquire, but finally both routes are functional.

Keywords

Albanian Reading difficulties Reading errors Transparent orthography 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This investigation was funded by grant MCI-PSI2009-09299 from the Spanish Government.

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Copyright information

© The International Dyslexia Association 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Facultad de PsicologíaUniversidad de OviedoOviedoSpain

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