Psycholinguistic abilities and reading in children spanish–quechua bilingual and spanish monolingual first degree

Abstract

The study sought to determine if differences exist in psycholinguistic skills: phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, semantic-syntactic, skills in Quechua-Spanish bilingual children (emerging and advanced) compared to monolingual spanish first grade children, and establish whether there is a relationship between those with reading skills. This was examined children of Junin, Huancavelica and Lima with test bilingualism (González 2008), Test of pre reading skills (Velarde et al 2010) and PROLEC -R (Cuetos, F. 2008). The results showed significant differences in psycholinguistic skills in favor of spanish monolingual children. In all tasks emerging bilingual yielded lower. No significant differences in reading processes evaluated. Anyway significant correlation is found between pre-reading skills: syllabic and phonemic awareness tasks of letter identification and recognition of same - different (reading decoding) as well as listening comprehension.