Abstract

The research described in this paper has the aim to know the stages of acquisition of reading and writing, from the second class to the fifth class of "scuola elementare". Our data, gathered in a large sample of children, allowed us to estimate different stages of competences in lexical and non lexical phonological abilities, in writing dictations of isolated words and non-words and in facing difficulties of visual-ortographic kind. The discussion of the results underlines the indipendence between writing and reading in nearly every stage of learning, but underlines also the variations to Frith's evolutive model (1985). In particular, the results found in our sample suggest a different relation within the competences of the alphabetic stage in the passage from this stage to the ortographic one.