Desarrollo de la conciencia sintáctica y fonológica en niños chilenosun estudio transversal

Abstract

The development of syntactic awareness has still not been widely investigated in a transparent orthography, such as Spanish. On the other hand, the increase of phonological awareness and its contribution to reading acquisition has received much more attention, both in opaque and transparent languages. Studies with English and French speaking children have demonstrated that syntactic awareness continues developing after reading instruction begins, and that even at the age of 11 or 14 it is not completely developed. The aim of this study was to describe and compare the development of syntactic awareness and phonological awareness in Chilean children from elementary grades. A sample of 234 Chilean children participated in the study, and they were assessed individually in syntactic and phonological awareness tasks. Results in Spanish confirmed similar findings found in opaque languages, as it was shown that both meta-linguistic abilities are still being developed at the school levels evaluated in this study.