Simpson, I. , Onochie-Quintanilla, E. & Defior, S.
Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain
Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Many studies have shown that children’s ability to name the letters of the alphabet is one of the best predictors of later reading and spelling performance. Further studies have looked at the types of errors made by English speaking children in letter naming tasks. While similar studies have been published for other languages such as Portuguese and Hebrew, no similar study exists for Spanish. We report the results from a longitudinal study of 190 children from the Andalucía region of Spain (mean age at the start of the study 6;7, range 6;1-7;1, 86 females) who took part in a series of letter naming and letter sound production tasks over a 2 year period. Factors predicting task success included letter frequency and whether the letter appeared in the child’s own name. An analysis of error type revealed that visual and phonological similarity led to letter confusion. While many of these results were similar to published results from English speaking children, this was not always the case. One particularly interesting result concerns acrophonic letters – letters whose name begins with the sound of that letter (e.g. “B” pronounced as /bi/). In English, children generally perform better on acrophonic letter names than they do on other letters (e.g. names that end with their sound of the letter, such as “F” pronounced as /ɛf/). Somewhat surprisingly we found that Spanish children performed worse on acrophonic letters than they did on other letters (e.g. “F” pronounced as /ɛfɛ/). As part of a comprehensive presentation of the study’s findings, we will discuss some of the reasons which may explain the difference between English and Spanish. The efficacy of early letter knowledge as a predictor of later literacy skills in Spanish will also be discussed.