The influence of social, individual and linguistic factors on children's performance in tasks of reading single words aloud

This study evaluates social, individual and linguistic factors in the performance of a single- word reading aloud task. A group of 1st to 4th grade school children from Belo Horizonte-MG (N = 333) read aloud 323 single words presented in a computer screen. Measures of reaction time (RT) and error scores were collected. The Generalized Estimating Equations method exhibited the grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme regularity effect in reading and also showed an impact on the number of categories of regularity in this effect. No social factor was important to explain the results, but their mothers' education was correlated to the error scores (in opposite direction). There was no gender effect. Other factors rather than the traditional ones were also relevant, such as the age of reading acquisition and the verbal comprehension. The work brings important theoretical issues to cognitive reading assessment in Brazil.

Reading; Regularity effect; Categories of regularity; Social factors