Cognitive Reading Evaluation: The Grapheme-Phoneme and the Phoneme-Grapheme Regularity Effect in the Word Reading Aloud in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

The study evaluates the regularity effect in the reading aloud of isolated words. School children from 1st to 3rd grade from a private school of Belo Horizonte City read, in two sessions, a list of 323 low frequency words. The stimuli varied from 4-8 letters and were classified into two categories of grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme regularity (regular and irregular). Measures of reaction time (RT) and of percentage of accuracy were collected. When we considered the grapheme-phoneme regularity, a general effect of regularity occurred in the errors, and this effect appeared both in RT and in the errors when we considered the phoneme-grapheme regularity. Such results suggest that, in Portuguese, the level of regularity of the spelling of words interfere in reading. In the light of these results, the methodology used for the construction of lists for the evaluation of the regularity effect in reading is discussed.

Keywords

• reading words aloud
• phonological strategy in reading
• regularity effect
• categories of regularity
• reaction time