This paper analyzes whether children are sensitive to Spanish spelling regularities, that is, whether they store and access high frequency sub-lexical units like syllables. A spelling test was administered to 259 argentine children from 4th through 7th grades. The test included 26 low frequency words containing the syllables /be/, /bi/, /siar/ and /sia/ in both their possible forms (<BE>/<VE>, <BI>/<VI>, <CIAR>/<SIAR> and <CIA>/<SIA>), forms that vary in their frequency levels in the Spanish orthographic system. Results indicate that children are highly sensitive to syllable frequency. This seems to indicate that for transparent orthographies, such as Spanish, learners initially rely on grapheme-phoneme conversion, which leads to the storage of sub-lexical units.

Este trabajo se propuso explorar si niños que leen y escriben en español, una lengua de ortografía transparente, son sensibles a la frecuencia de las sílabas de su sistema ortográfico. Para ello, se evaluó a 259 niños que cursaban 4to, 5to, 6to y 7mo grado de la escolaridad primaria mediante una prueba de escritura de 26 palabras ortográficamente complejas de muy baja frecuencia. Dichas palabras incluían las cadenas sonoras /be/, /bi/, /siar/ y /sia/ en sus dos posibles formas ortográficas (<BE>/<VE>, <BI>/<VI>, <CIAR>/<SIAR> y <CIA>/<SIA>) formas que varían en su nivel de frecuencia. Los resultados obtenidos indican que, efectivamente, los niños son altamente sensibles a la frecuencia de las sílabas lo que sugiere que almacenan cadenas subléxicas frecuentes del sistema ortográfico.

This paper analyzes whether children are sensitive to Spanish spelling regularities, that is, whether they store and access high frequency sub-lexical units like syllables. A spelling test was administered to 259 argentine children from 4th through 7th grades. The test included 26 low frequency words containing the syllables /be/, /bi/, /siar/ and /sia/ in both their possible forms (<BE>/<VE>, <BI>/<VI>, <CIAR>/<SIAR> and <CIA>/<SIA>), forms that vary in their frequency levels in the Spanish orthographic system. Results indicate that children are highly sensitive to syllable frequency. This seems to indicate that for transparent orthographies, such as Spanish, learners initially rely on grapheme-phoneme conversion, which leads to the storage of sub-lexical units.