Phonological processing and reading in a semi-transparent orthography (Polish)

Abstract

Background: In the semi-transparent Polish orthography, children develop their reading skills from sound blending, through syllable and morpheme blending, to word and phrase recognition strategies (Awramiuk & Krasowicz-Kupis, 2015). Aim: The aim of the study was to examine reading proficiency and reading strategies of year 4, 11-year-old primary school students, and to investigate the relationship between the selected aspects of phono-logical processing and literacy skills. We aimed to confront the newly collected empirical data with the already developed model of reading acquisition to confirm the developmental path of reading strate-gies. Methods: We used a set of tests measuring phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), working memory, short story reading, nonword reading, and reading comprehension. Results: Most children achieved a global stage in reading, as the most frequent mistake was an entire word repetition, followed by a syllable blending, and a syllable and sound blending combined among word reading errors. Phonological awareness predicted the number of errors, and RAN - the accuracy and fluency of the short story reading. Conclusions: Our results confirm the development of reading strategies from phonological-analytical to global in Polish. This model is consistent with other alphabetical orthographies.