Psicothema was founded in Asturias (northern Spain) in 1989, and is published jointly by the Psychology Faculty of the University of Oviedo and the Psychological Association of the Principality of Asturias (Colegio Oficial de Psicología del Principado de Asturias).
We currently publish four issues per year, which accounts for some 100 articles annually. We admit work from both the basic and applied research fields, and from all areas of Psychology, all manuscripts being anonymously reviewed prior to publication.
Psicothema, 2008. Vol. Vol. 20 (nº 4). 672-677
Elena Garayzabal Heinze y Fernando Cuetos Vega*
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid y * Universidad de Oviedo
Las personas con síndrome de Williams se caracterizan por tener capacidades lingüísticas superiores a lo que corresponderían por su inteligencia. Respecto al nivel de lectura existe controversia dada la escasez de estudios. El objetivo de este trabajo era comprobar las capacidades de lectura de un grupo de niños con SW en edad escolar, y para ello se contrastó su ejecución con un grupo control de la misma edad mental. Tres tipos de tareas fueron utilizadas: lectura de palabras y pseudopalabras, tareas metafonológicas y de denominación rápida. Los resultados muestran que el grupo con SW tiene una ejecución similar al grupo control en la precisión lectora de pseudopalabras, aunque son más lentos en la lectura tanto de palabras como de pseudopalabras. También son más lentos en las tareas de denominación rápida. Estos resultados sugieren que los SW no tienen dificultades para desarrollar los mecanismos de conversión grafema-fonema, pero muestran ciertas dificultades en el desarrollo de la lectura léxica.
Learning to read in children with Williams Syndrome. People with Williams syndrome are characterized by linguistic abilities that are higher than their level of intelligence. There is controversy concerning their reading level because there are few studies. The aim of this work was to test reading abilities in a group of school-age children with Williams syndrome. Their performance was contrasted with a control group of the same mental age. Three kinds of tasks were used: word and pseudoword reading, phonological awareness, and naming speed. Results show that the Williams syndrome children performed similarly to control children in reading accuracy but were slower in reading words and pseudowords. They were also slower in the naming speed tasks. These results suggest that Williams syndrome children do not have difficulties in developing grapheme-phoneme decoding but do present some difficulties in developing lexical reading.
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