Development of spelling skills in Spanish orthography: a longitudinal study Francisca Serrano Universidad de Granada [email protected] Gracia Jiménez Fernández Universidad de Granada [email protected] Sylvia Defior Universidad de Granada [email protected] Key words: spelling skills, spanish orthography, lexical effect, complexity effect, phoneme-grapheme correspondences Abstract The main aim of this research was to study the spelling skills development in the early stages of learning of Spanish children. Several studies show that the depth of the orthography affects spelling acquisition; it is supposed that spelling skills are easier to acquire in a transparent orthography than in a deep orthography. The Spanish written system is considered shallow, but has some complexities in the mapping of phonemes onto graphemes. Participants were 63 Spanish children in first grade of Primary Education. All the children are tested at three different Test Points (November, February and May) with four dictation tasks: Letter knowledge, simple and complex word spelling (6 items) and pseudoword spelling. The goals were to study the lexical and non-lexical spelling procedures according to the dual route models, on one hand, and to investigate the complexity effect in spelling. Syllabic structure influence and error analysis were also carried out. Results showed a high level of performance in all task and lexical effect, complexity effect and syllabic structure effect was found. The findings are discussed regarding Spanish written system transparency and the teaching methods used in the early stages of spelling acquisition. Introduction Reading and spelling acquisition is an instructional goal relevant enough to deserve the analysis of the conditions that could facilitate this acquisition. However, research in cognitive processes underlying spelling development has received less attention than those implied in reading skill development. In the last years, spelling studies have permitted to make progress in spelling development models as well as in the explanation of spelling disabilities (Brown & Ellis, 1994). European languages vary significantly in orthographic complexity. According to the degree of consistency of the phoneme-grapheme correspondences, orthographies can be put on an orthographic depth continuum from transparent or shallow orthographies, with an almost perfect mapping of phonemes onto graphemes, to deep orthographies which contain orthographic inconsistencies and complexities, including multi-letter graphemes, context dependent rules, irregularities, and morphological effects. There is agreement that some European orthographies are relatively shallow (Finnish, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German) while others are deeper in the sense of containing more inconsistent correspondences as well as more morphological influences on spelling (Portuguese, French, Danish, English) (Seymour, Aro and Erskine, 2003). Cross-linguistic studies (Öney and Durgunoglu, 1994; Landerl, Wimmer and Frith, 1997; Seymour et al., 2003) have highlighted differences between the different orthographic systems. It is suggested that the results of the studies carried out with English speakers are not totally applicable to other languages. According to these studies, the development of literacy skills takes place differently depending on the characteristics of the writing system and the linguistic environment where the development of the learner takes place (Defior, 2004; Müller and Brady, 2001). Some recent studies also point out the influence of factors of educational nature as the reading method (Genard, Alegria, Leybaert, Mousty and Defior, 2004). Spanish is a clear example of a shallow orthographic system in reading. Each grapheme has a clear and precise phonemic translation. The grapheme-phoneme correspondes (GPCRs) allows readers to determine the phoneme corresponding to each specific grapheme without ambiguity, and thus reading is controlled by a set of consistent rules. There are simple GPCRs concerning the five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and 19 graphonemes (b, d, f, ch, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, p, rr, qu, s, t, v, w, z). Each of these units maps to a single phoneme in reading. There is also one silent letter (h). There are some contextual GPCRs to establish the pronunciation of graphemes that may map to two or more phonemes (c, g, r, x, y), but these conversions are totally predictable and stable, depending on the grapheme that follows and/or their position in the word. For instance, the grapheme c is read /k/ when followed by the graphemes a, o, or u, as in casa (house) but it is read /q/ when followed by e or i as in cena (supper). The grapheme g is read /g/ when followed by the graphemes a, o, or u as in gato (cat) but it is read /x/ when followed by e or i as in gitano (gypsy). The grapheme r is read /r/ when it is not located in initial position as in cara (face), but it is read /R/ when located at the beginning of the word or following the letters n, l, or s as in rosa (rose) or Israel (Israel). The grapheme y takes the vowel value /i/ when isolated or located at the end of the word, as in rey (king), but it takes the consonant value /j/ in the rest of the cases, as in yema (yoke). The grapheme x is read /s/ when located at the beginning of the word, as in xilófono (xylophone), but it is read /ks/ in the remainder of cases, as in taxi (taxi) (Defior, Cary & Martos, 2002). However, Spanish orthography is slightly unpredictable in spelling, due to the existence of certain phonemes which can be transcribed with more than one grapheme, namely inconsistent graphonemes (Marín, Carrillo & Alegría, 1999). For example, /b/ could be spelled as b or v, as in vaso (glass) and base (base); /x/ could be spelled j or g with vowels e and i, as in jirafa (giraffe) and gitano (gypsy); or the case of letter h that have no sound, for instance, ola (wave) and hola (hello). The speller needs specific knowledge of the word (orthographic lexicon) for an adequate spelling of the words that contain inconsistent graphonemes (sounds that could be represented by more than one grapheme). Spelling acquisition implies phonological skills, required for the application of the GPCRs when we write no familiar words and pseudowords. At the same time, the beginner speller needs lexical knowledge concerning the orthographic pattern of the words in the mentioned cases. Some studies have proven that the features of any alphabetic system, mainly its degree of transparency, affect the development of its acquisition. These studies show that such features have a major influence in the time needed to acquire the code (Cossu, 1999; Wimmer, Landerl & Frith, 1999) and on the type of orthographic unit (phonemes, intrasyllabic units) relevant for such acquisition (Defior, 2004; Share & Levin, 1999). Beginning spellers in a shallow orthography may be helped by the phonological transparency of the language. It is expected that they would write better ‘simple graphonemes’ in which phoneme-grapheme correspondences are 1:1, than ‘complex graphonemes’ in which the correspondences are not biunivocal. This study is part of a large longitudinal one in which the early development of cognitive processes involved in reading and spelling acquisition in a variety of orthographies is analysed. The main aim of this study was to focus on early spelling skill development through a longitudinal approach that consisted of three test points along the 1st grade Primary School, in the context of a shallow orthography as Spanish. The assessments were carried out in November (TP1), February (TP2), and May (TP3). As a secondary goal, lexical and non-lexical spelling procedures were investigated using a word and a pseudoword dictation task. Thirdly, complexity effect is studied contrasting simple versus complex words spelling. Finally, syllabic structure effect and type of spelling errors are analyzed. Method Participants A total of sixty-three Spanish first graders from two public schools participated in the study. Their mean age was 76 months at the beginning of the study. The mean reading age was 7;5 years. The mean CI was 106.8 and the mean digit memory span percentile was 63.3. The teachers used a mixed method, in which the grapheme-phoneme correspondences and meaning was the main focus of the teaching-learning processes. Materials A set of dictation tasks was used. Each of the three test points included letter knowledge, simple and complex words and pseudowords. A CI measure (Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices), a standardised measure of reading development (PEREL) and a verbal short memory task (Digit span, from WISC-R) were also administered in TP3. Letter knowledge It was tested with a set of twenty-seven letter included in the Spanish alphabet. Note that for letter knowledge, names were presented. Both spellings in upper and lower case spelling were admitted. Simple word spelling The task included 24 very familiar high frequency words. Half of the items were content words (nouns) and the other half were function words (conjunction, preposition and interjection). All the correspondences phoneme- grapheme were consistent (1 letter:1 sound). The words were two or three syllables length. Complex word spelling The task included 48 very familiar high frequency words. Half of the items were content words and the other half were function words. Each word contained one complex graphoneme (1:0, 2:1). Pseudoword spelling 48 pseudowords containing different syllabic structures (CV, VC, CVC, CVCV, VCVC and CVCVC), with consistent phoneme-grapheme correspondences were built in order to analyse syllabic structure effect in children’s spelling development. Procedure A longitudinal design was used. The children were tested three times along the first Primary School year: The first test point (TP1) was in November, the second one (TP2) was in February and the last one (TP3) was in May. The dictation tasks consisted of asking the children to write the list of items. The children were given a sheet of paper with blanks to fill the words in.