Reading strategies in English by adults whose first language is Spanish

Abstract

The performance of nine Spanish speakers on tests of single-word reading and phonological awareness in English was examined and compared to that of monolingual adults and to that of monolingual children of similar reading ability. Even though the Spanish participants had several years experience of reading and writing in English and performed well at reading nonwords, they showed little evidence of phonological processing strategies when reading familiar words. For example, they performed relatively poorly at written rhyme judgements despite good performance on tests of phonological awareness. When compared to monolingual English children, the Spanish speakers made fewer phonological errors on tests of visual lexical decision and written homophone definition. Unlike the children, they showed no evidence of a regularity effect in reading. Only on unfamiliar words did they show evidence of phonological processing in reading. Possible explanations of this pattern of performance are discussed.

Keywords:

• Orthography
• Transparency
• Bilingualism
• L2 reading