**Developmental Dyslexia in Spain**

Manuel Soriano‐Ferrer and Manuel R.

**Developmental Dyslexia in Spain**

#### Manuel Soriano‐Ferrer and Manuel R. Morte‐Soriano Morte‐Soriano Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

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44 Learning Disabilities - An International Perspective

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.69009

#### **Abstract**

Spanish‐speaking children learn to read words written in a relatively transparent orthography. Variations in orthographic transparency may shape the manifestation of developmental dyslexia. In Spanish, as in other transparent orthographies, reading speed/ fluency seems to be more evident and relevant than accuracy problems. In addition, the prevalence of dyslexia is much lower in Spanish than in less consistent or less transparent orthographies. Spanish students with developmental dyslexia have numerous lags in several cognitive (e.g., phonological awareness, rapid naming, verbal and visual‐spatial working memory, and executive functioning), academic (e.g., pseudoword reading, spelling, and vocabulary), and emotional (e.g., reading self‐concept, engagement, and reading motivation) areas. Intervention programs developed with Spanish children with dyslexia have ranged from phonological‐based programs to fluency‐based programs, with and without a computer.

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.69009

**Keywords:** developmental dyslexia, Spanish, cognitive deficits, motivation, intervention

### **1. Introduction**

Spain is a European country with a Human Development Index of 0.87, which means it ranks 26th out of 188 countries. The Human Development Report [1] provides a composite measure of three dimensions of human development: living a long and healthy life, being educated, and having a decent standard of living.

In Spain, the Spanish language is spoken. Spanish is classified as an Indo‐European language of the romance subfamily. Spanish has a shallow and fine‐grained orthography. That is, the orthography‐phonology mapping is completely rule‐governed across the language, although it is less transparent in writing. Specifically, the Spanish orthography has 27 graphemes (five vowels

and 22 consonants), each of which represents a unique sound, and five digraphs (ch, ll, rr, gu, and qu). The last three are considered positional variants of the phonemes/r/, /g/ and /k/; two diacritical marks: stress mark or acute accent ('), and dieresis (¨). Therefore, grapheme‐phoneme correspondences are predictable in reading, but this does not occur in writing, where inconsistent phoneme‐grapheme correspondences are added, producing phonemes that correspond to several graphemes. For example, eight consonant phonemes can be represented using more than one grapheme: /b/(B, V, W), /k/(K, QU, C), /g/(G, GU), /x/(G, J), /j/(Y, LL), /rr/(R, RR), /Ø/ (Z, C), /s/(S, X).

In addition, Spanish is regarded as a syllable‐timed language [2], whereas English is considered stress timed [3]. Syllables are the most consistent sub‐lexical units in regular orthographies such as Spanish [4], and 88.73% of the Spanish syllables have a very simple syllabic structure with the CV, CVC, V, or VC combination [5]. The longest syllable has five graphemes with a maximum of two initial consonants that rarely appear in coda position. Some geographic varieties of Spanish differ from each other in terms of phonology, but this does not seem to cause comprehension problems between speakers [3]. Fundamental supra‐segmental features are stress and intonation. The stress in Spanish marks intensity, and it falls on one of the last three syllables in the word, counting from the end (e.g., paroxytone words, oxytone words, and proparoxytone words). Intonation is the melodic curve the voice traces when uttering sentences. On the basis of their direction and the extent of the intonation contour, five types of final inflections have been distinguished that maintain distinctive characteristics surrounding the assertion, interrogation, exclamation, and appeal modes [6].

Thus, the grapheme‐phoneme correspondence is predictable in reading. That is, an expert reader is capable of unequivocally determining the correct pronunciation of a written word or a pseudoword based on correspondence rules. However, this situation does not occur in writing, where inconsistent phoneme‐grapheme correspondences are added, producing doubts because a single phoneme can correspond to several graphemes, which affects the transparency of the code.

Intercultural studies suggest that the level of orthographic transparency determines the reading performance of children with dyslexia [7–9]. Thus, the characteristics of the Spanish language influence, in part, the prevalence and manifestations of dyslexia in Spanish.
