title: Assessment of Reading Precursors in Spanish-Speaking Children.
abstract: This study's purpose was to analyse basic reading processes in different age groups of Spanish-speaking children using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and regression analysis. Two hundred forty-five children (aged 4 years and 9 months, to 9 years and 7 months; 120 boys, 125 girls), native Spanish-speakers, were selected from schools in Madrid. All participants were in either their last year of preschool or the first three years of elementary school, depending on their age. Nine classic reading tasks were created and administered to measure three reading skills: word recognition, phonological awareness, and reading comprehension. The results of the CFA show that data fit to proposed model with a general reading factor based on these three reading skills χ2(27) = 29.03, p = .36, RMSEA = .02, 90% CIs [.0, .05], CFI = 1.0. The word recognition skills were the best at describing reading performance in preschool children (R 2 = .51 for word identification task); phonological awareness, especially rhyme identification task, discriminated well until second grade (R 2 = .60); and finally, reading comprehension, basically phrase completion task, were the best measure of reading performance in third grade (R 2 = .45).
authors.affiliation: Universidad Andrés Bello (Chile).
authors.forename: Anibal
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Puente
authors.affiliation: Universidad Complutense (Spain).
authors.forename: Jesús M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Alvarado
authors.affiliation: Universidad Complutense (Spain).
authors.forename: Paz
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Fernández
authors.affiliation: Florida Atlantic University (USA).
authors.forename: Mónica
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rosselli
authors.affiliation: Florida International University (USA).
authors.forename: Alfredo
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ardila
authors.affiliation: Universidad Complutense (Spain).
authors.forename: Amelia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Jiménez
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D013030:Spain
keywords: Spanish language; phonological awareness; reading comprehension; word recognition