Linguistic and cognitive skills in readers and nonreaders.

Background: investigation of linguistic and cognitive skills in readers and nonreaders.

Aim: to evaluate the performance of readers and nonreaders in tasks related to several linguistic and cognitive skills and to determine the implication of the results to the clinical practice and to eduaction.

Method: participants of the study were 35 children in the process of alphabetization. The children were given tasks designed to assess their cognitive and linguistic abilities. The group of nonreaders was composed by 20 children who did not read any of the words presented on a list of 24 items. The group of readers included 15 children who read nearly every word presented on the same list.

Results: the group of readers presented a better performance on the following tasks: language development assessment; alphanumeric rapid automatized naming and working memory. There was a great variability in the performance of readers and nonreaders in the phonological awareness tasks. For the group of readers, syllabic judgment and segmentation tasks were considered easy or very easy; syllabic transposition and phonemic subtraction presented medium difficulty and phoneme identification was considered a difficult task. For the group of nonreaders, syllabic segmentation was considered an easy task; syllabic judgment presented medium difficulty, and syllabic transposition, phonemic subtraction and phoneme identification were considered very difficult.

Conclusion: the experience with reading influences the performance of children in linguistic and cognitive tasks. The performance of readers and nonreaders in the phonological awareness assessments indicates the importance of taking into account not only the required level of linguistic segmentation but also the cognitive level required by the nature of the task.