Support for a psycholinguistic approach to reading acquisition and reacting difficulties:: Twenty years later

The paper examines a child's first steps in the process of reading acquisition through data collected over the last 20 years. The central focus is on the development of the processes involved in identifying written words because these processes are specific to reading. It is argued that word identification develops through a self-learning process, which works by translating graphemes into their corresponding phonological representations. Phonological awareness and, more specifically, phonemic awareness are abilities that are causally related with the development of reading mechanisms. Studies concerning the development of phonemic awareness show that this ability does not evolve without systematic intervention specifically targeting this end, which argues in favour of phonologically oriented teaching methods. Comparative studies of reading acquisition with different alphabetic systems suggest that phonic teaching methods are especially suited to transparent systems like Spanish. Finally, reading problems and dyslexia are considered to be phonologically based. These problems are not limited to written word identification but also involve phonological aspects which are not specifically related to reading, such as, fine phonemic discrimination, access to phonological representations of words as in picture naming and verbal fluency tasks.