Influence of Reading Skills on Sound Categorization Tasks in Spanish-Speaking Children

A deficit in phonological awareness (PA) has been proposed as the main cognitive failure in developmental dyslexia (DD), since a significant proportion of children with DD show low scores on such tasks. However, it has also been argued that this poor performance is less a cause than an effect of DD, because performance on PA tasks is influenced by reading skills. This study examined the effect of reading skills on PA task performance in typical readers (TRs) and children with DD by comparing scores in two sound categorization tasks to assess PA: one in which the phonological beginnings of the words also shared spelling, and the other in which spelling of the words was unhelpful or impeded finding the correct answers. TRs and children with DD showed lower scores on the second task, demonstrating that performance on PA tasks is influenced by reading skills. In order to assess PA accurately, it is necessary to develop instruments, tasks, or procedures that control, avoid, or remove the influence of reading skills, especially in transparent languages like Spanish, in which there is a high rate of correspondence between phonemes and graphemes.