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Prosodic Awareness Skills and Literacy Acquisition in Spanish

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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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Correspondence to Sylvia Defior.

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Defior, S., Gutiérrez-Palma, N. & Cano-Marín, M.J. Prosodic Awareness Skills and Literacy Acquisition in Spanish. J Psycholinguist Res 41, 285–294 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-011-9192-0

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