The Role of Phonological Processing in Dyslexia in the Spanish Language

This chapter presents theoretical arguments and empirical evidence to support the idea that the phonological deficit in dyslexia in a language with a transparent orthography such as Spanish is at the phoneme level in the phonological awareness continuum, suggesting that a phonemic deficit is curtailing the development of phonological decoding. Results of two studies are presented to demonstrate the role of phonological processing in dyslexia in the Spanish language. The first study examines the dyslexic subtypes within the context of a reading-level match in a transparent orthography. In this research we explored whether developmental dyslexics form a homogeneous population, with a unique underlying impairment, or whether they form distinct subgroups. The second study examines the effects of a computer-assisted intervention designed to improve the visual word recognition of Spanish-speaking children identified with a learning disability (LD).