Differences in reading acquisition development in two shallow orthographies: Portuguese and Spanish

The present study examines the role of the relative transparency of Portuguese and Spanish orthographies in schoolchildren’s word recognition procedures. Both Portuguese and Spanish may be considered as transparent orthographies. However, mappings at the grapheme–phoneme level are more consistent in Spanish than in Portuguese. Four groups of Portuguese and Spanish children from grades 1, 2, 3, and 4, who had been taught to read using a phonics-based approach, were given a Portuguese and a Spanish version of three different continuous reading tasks: numeral reading, number word reading, and pseudoword reading. Reading time per item was measured and errors noted. Improvement in reading time was observed in both orthographies from grades 1 to 4. There were no errors in numeral recognition and few children made errors in reading the number words. In pseudoword reading, the Spanish children were faster and made fewer errors than the Portuguese children. Errors in pseudoword reading were scored as phonological when leading to the production of another pseudoword and as lexical when involving refusals and/or the production of a real word. Portuguese children made more phonological errors than the Spanish group, and there was no difference in the number of lexical errors. The results are discussed in terms of the role played by the differing orthographic transparency of Spanish and Portuguese in young readers’ word recognition