Juan L., L. 1 , Soraya, B. 1 , Marisol, C. 2 , Jesús, A. 3 , Miguel, L. 1 , Victoria, R. 1 & Almudena, G. 1
1 Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Málaga; Málaga, Spain
2 Facultad de Educación, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain
3 Universidad Libre de Bruselas
Phonological processing deficits have been pointed out as the main cause of developmental dyslexia (Snowling, 2000). This deficit affects three basic components: phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory and rapid naming (Wagner and Torgesen, 1987).There are some cross-linguistics differences depending on the degree of consistency of orthographic systems (Ramus et al., In press, Ziegler et al., 2010). Such differences have important implications for the diagnosis of dyslexia in a specific language. This study investigates the relationship between phoneme awareness, rapid naming, verbal short-term memory and literacy skills in control and dyslexic Spanish children. From an epidemiological sample of 1186 students belonging to 14 schools of the Málaga province, a representative sample was selected. A group of 102 dyslexics were identified and a control group of 109 normoreaders, from two schools levels (7 & 9 yrs). Analysis of variance was applied to assess differences between dyslexics and control readers in the skills assessed, and regression analysis to establish the diagnostic value of the three phonological processes. The dyslexics shown difficulties in the three phonological processes evaluated. The phonological awareness tasks were shown as the most predictive, followed by short-term verbal memory and finally the naming speed measures. The latter have shown a stronger relationship with measures of speed than the accuracy ones. Moreover, the predictive capacity of the phonological tests decreases with the increase of the school year in dyslexics, being also lower than the prediction of reading ability differences between normally achieving readers. Although with some specific language differences, the findings are largely consistent with the literature on predictors of dyslexia and literacy skills, so the applied set of tests could be useful tools to the diagnosis of dyslexia.