Carrillo Gallego, M. S. 1 & Alegria Iscoa, J. 2
1 Dpto. Psicologia Evolutiva y de la Educacion. Universidad de Murcia (UMU) - Spain
2 Lab. Cognition Langage et Dévelopment. Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) - Belgium
Word spelling involves, besides grapheme to phoneme translation rules, two purely orthographic processes, one based on whole-lexical representations and another one exploiting sub-lexical regularities. Data collected in English and French, two opaque orthographic systems, show that young children do use sub-lexical regularities. The present study examines the acquisition of lexical and sub-lexical abilities in Spanish, a transparent system. To examine these question Spanish-speaking participants were asked to spell high and low frequency words containing sequences like “va, ve, vi...” in witch phoneme-grapheme translation rules are useless. Spelling would therefore reflect both word frequency and sub-lexical regularity effects (i.e. “vi” is more frequent than “bi” at word beginning while “va” is less frequent than “ba”). The results show strong lexical and sub-lexical effects from first grade onwards. In a second experiment the nature of units stored in orthographic memory was examined. The results were compatible with the notion that this information was purely orthographic and it didn’t take into account the syllabic structure of words. Results are discussed in the context of specific features of orthographic learning in transparent systems and on the role of implicit mechanisms involved in learning to read and spell.