THE ARCHITECTURE OF READING ACQUISITION: PHONOLOGICAL AND LEXICAL SKILLS AS MARKERS OF COMPREHENSION IN SECOND GRADE
Abstract
In the early school years, reading comprehension emerges from the interaction between sublexical phonological processes and lexical skills. The relative importance of these processes varies according to the stage of development and level of reading performance. This study aimed to describe the differential profile of phonological and lexical skills in second-grade elementary school students with transparent spelling, according to their reading comprehension performance. A quantitative, cross-sectional, comparative study was conducted with 75 Chilean schoolchildren, who were classified into three groups based on their scores on the Global Reading Comprehension Index of the ELFE II test. Computerised language skills tasks were administered and non-parametric comparative analyses were performed. The results showed that grapheme-to-phoneme conversion was the most effective skill for distinguishing between the groups, followed by phonemic synthesis and initial phoneme identification; meanwhile, vocabulary was most effective at distinguishing the lowest-performing group. These findings provide evidence on reading development in Spanish-speaking populations and highlight the importance of neuropsychological assessments with a dimensional approach for identifying early risk profiles.
Keywords: reading comprehension; phonological skills; vocabulary; transparent spelling; empirical article
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Copyright (c) 2026 Danilka Castro-Cañizares, Tatiana Mazuera-Velázquez, Allison V. Zomosa, Tania C. Fredes
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