Marta Álvarez-Cañizo

Different studies have demonstrated that people with dyslexia have difficulties in acquiring fluent reading and writing. These problems are also evident when they learn a second language. The aim of our study was to investigate if there is a linguistic transfer effect for writing in children with dyslexia when they face tasks in English (L2), as well as the possible influence of other linguistic skills (spelling, vocabulary and reading) in English (L2) and in Spanish (L1). Participants completed a series of tasks both in Spanish and English: a picture naming task, a word reading task, a word spelling task, and a written composition of which we analysed its quality through different variables provided by the Coh-metrix software. Our results revealed that children with dyslexia show similar or parallel performance in written composition in both languages, which could imply a language transfer effect from L1 and L2. Besides, basic language skills are related to the characteristics of written composition to a greater extent in English than in Spanish, suggesting the impact of these on the quality of written composition.

Procrastination in academic activities is common amongst university students, and has negative consequences for their personal as well as academic development. As a result, there is a need for valid –yet at the same time brief and clear-cut– measurement tools that enable the specific procrastinating behaviour of university students to be measured. This work explores in depth the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Academic Procrastination Scale, a widely used brief tool in secondary and higher education in the Spanish speaking world. The scale was applied to a total of 1734 university students, together with the Procrastination Assessment Scale-Students (PASS), the Unintentional Procrastination Scale (UPS) and the Active Procrastination Scale (APS). Factor analyses indicate the best fit is a structure involving four interrelated factors (task aversion, poor time management, low emotional and motivational self-control, and risk assumption) compared to other proposed models. The model presents factorial invariance between men and women, and adequate convergent validity. We discuss the implications of using this scale in higher education, since differentiating the four factors might help to identify different support measures depending on university student needs.

Several studies have highlighted that reading comprehension is determined by different linguistic skills: semantics, syntax, and morphology, in addition to one’s own competence in reading fluency (accuracy, speed, and prosody). On the other hand, according to the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis, linguistic skills developed in one’s own native language (L1) facilitate the development of these skills in a second one (L2). In this study, we wanted to explore the linguistic abilities that determine reading comprehension in Spanish (L1) and in English (L2) in Secondary Education students. To do this, 73 Secondary Education Students (1st and 3rd year) participated in this study. The students carried out a battery of tasks in English and Spanish, all of them related to reading comprehension (expository text) and different linguistic skills, which included syntactic awareness tasks, synonymy judgment tasks (vocabulary), and morphological awareness tasks. The results indicated a positive correlation between linguistic competencies in both languages (indicating a transfer effect between languages), which were determined by school year, with a lower performance in the 1st year than in the 3rd year. Moreover, we found more skills with correlations in English reading comprehension than in Spanish. Finally, reading comprehension in L1 was mainly explained English reading comprehension, while English reading comprehension was predicted by grade, and syntactic awareness, as well as Spanish reading comprehension. This could be explained by the different levels of exposure to L1 and L2 of sample subjects, as the linguistic variables have different influences on the reading comprehension of both languages.

Orthographic learning is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. There are different variables that could influence the formation of orthographic representations. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the previous semantic and phonological knowledge on the formation of orthographic representations. We used a decrease of the length effect as the measure of orthographic learning. We made a reading aloud task that utilised new words with Spanish children from third grade under three different conditions: with prior semantic and phonological training, with prior phonological training and without training. Results showed that knowing the meaning and the phonological form of the words facilitated the formation of orthographic representations, as the length effect was significantly lower than in the other conditions, and it also improved the children's reading performance.

Several studies have found that, after repeated exposure to new words, children form orthographic representations that allow them to read those words faster and more fluently. However, these studies did not take into account variables related to the words. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of sublexical variables on the formation of orthographic representations of words by Spanish children. The first experiment used pseudo-words of varying syllabic structure and syllabic frequency. The stimuli for the second experiment were formed with or without context-dependent graphemes. We found that formation of orthographic representations was influenced by syllabic structure (easier for words with simple syllabic structure) and the context-dependency of graphemes (easier in the absence of context-dependent graphemes), but not syllabic frequency. These results indicate that the easier it is to read a word, the easier it is to form an orthographic representation of it.

Reading becomes expressive when word and text reading are quick, accurate and automatic. Recent studies have reported that skilled readers use greater pitch changes and fewer irrelevant pauses than poor readers. Given that developmental dyslexics have difficulty acquiring and automating the alphabetic code and developing orthographic representations of words, it is possible that their use of prosody when reading differs from that of typical readers. The goal of this study was to investigate whether the reading prosody of Spanish-speaking dyslexics differs from that of typical Spanish readers. Two experiments were performed. The first experiment involved 36 children (18 with dyslexia), and the second involved 46 adults (23 with dyslexia). Participants were asked to read aloud a text which included declarative, exclamatory and interrogative sentences. Data on pausing and reading rate (number of pauses, duration of pauses and utterances), pitch changes, intensity changes and syllable lengthening were extracted from the recordings. We found that dyslexic people read more slowly than typical readers and they also made more inappropriate and longer pauses, even as adults with considerable reading experience. We also observed that dyslexics differed from skilled readers in their use of some prosodic features, particularly pitch changes at the end of sentences. This is probably because they have trouble anticipating some structural features of prose, such as sentence ends.

Understanding a written text requires some higher cognitive abilities that not all children have. Some children have these abilities, since they understand oral texts; however they have difficulties with written texts, probably due to problems in reading fluency. The aim of this study was to determine which aspects of reading fluency are related to reading comprehension. Four expositive texts, two written and two read by the evaluator, were presented to a sample of 103 primary school children (third and sixth grade). Each text was followed by four comprehension questions. From this sample we selected two groups of participants in each grade, 10 with good results in comprehension of oral and written texts, and 10 with good results in oral and poor in written comprehension. These 40 subjects were asked to read aloud a new text while they were recorded. Using Praat software some prosodic parameters were measured, such as pausing and reading rate (number and duration of the pauses and utterances), pitch and intensity changes and duration in declarative, exclamatory and interrogative sentences and also errors and duration in words by frequency and stress. We compared the results of both groups with ANOVAs. The results showed that children with less reading comprehension made more inappropriate pauses and also intersentential pauses before comma than the other group and made more mistakes in content words; significant differences were also found in the final declination of pitch in declarative sentences and in the F0 range in interrogative ones. These results confirm that reading comprehension problems in children are related to a lack in the development of a good reading fluency.

In order to read fluently, children have to form orthographic representations. Despite numerous investigations, there is no clear answer to the question of the number of times they need to read a word to form an orthographic representation. We used length effect on reading times as a measure, because there are large differences between long and short words for unknown words, differences that disappear when reading frequent words. Two lists of new words (half short and half long) were presented to 102 second‐grade to sixth‐grade Spanish children, to be read aloud six times. One of the lists was presented as part of a story and the other in isolation. Comparison of the length effect at the first and sixth exposure showed large differences between short and long words in the first presentation and small differences at the sixth presentation, indicating that Spanish children develop representations of words after just a few repetitions.