Autores:
Micaela Difalcis, Aldo Ferreres, Natalia Osiadacz, Valeria Abusamra
Resumen:
The aim of this work was to design and apply a test of reading words and non-words
(PaNoPa) to study the response latencies in Spanish-speaking subjects. A single
previous study had reported such effects but the test used did not control lexical
variables (number and frequency of orthographic neighbors) or sublexical variables
(frequency of bigram and initial phonemes) that are important for the correct analysis of
latencies. The study of effects of lexicality and frequency in control participants is
relevant for the discussion on the universality of psycholinguistic reading models and
also for the characterization of reading disorders due to brain lesions (acquired dyslexia)
in Spanish-speaking subjects. With an exhaustively controlled test, reading latencies
were obtained in a sample of Spanish-speaking readers and an ANOVA analysis was
carried out by subject and by type of stimulus. The results showed significantly lower
latencies for words with respect to non-words (lexicality effect) and for frequent words
regarding infrequent words (frequency effect). A significant difference was also found
between the latencies of the infrequent words and the non-words. These findings
provide evidence in favor of the existence of a lexical reading route in a transparent
language such as Spanish and provide a tool and data for the psycholinguistic study of
the reading alterations of Spanish-speaking subjects with acquired dyslexia.