Avdyli, R. & Cuetos, F.
University of Oviedo
Several cross-linguistic studies have suggested different reading strategies are used by children who present reading difficulties across different orthographies. Albanian is an Indo-European language with a shallow orthography, in which there is an absolute correspondence between graphemes and phonemes. It is widely known that in transparent orthography it is easier to learn reading than in opaque orthographies. We aimed to know reading strategies used by Albanian disabled children during word and nonword reading. A pool of 114 Kosovar children diagnosed with reading difficulties matched with 220 normal readers, aged 6 to 11 years old were tested. They had to read 120 stimuli varied in lexicality, frequency and length. The results in terms of reading accuracy shows that children with reading difficulties are more accurate in words than nonwords, just as in short than long stimuli. Reading times were affected only by word length being faster on short than long stimuli. We also found a number of significant interaction effects. The effect of length was significantly modulated by school year, being greater in early grades and later diminishes. Analyses of the error patterns showed that phonological errors, when the letter replacement leading to new nonwords, is the most common error type. The fact that this kind of error is more frequent in children with reading difficulties compared with normal group reveals that the first group uses more the indirect route than normal readers. However, visual errors in words, and lexicalization in nonwords shows that even Kosovar disabled readers use both routes (lexical and sublexical) from the beginning of reading. These data suggests that despite of the completely regularity of Albanian, lexical route it is used as in opaque orthographies from the beginning of reading.