The present work attempts to review the main conclusions of the studies carried out in the area of word recognition with Portuguese speaking children and to raise theoretical and methodological issues that still require the attention of researchers. The emphasis of this work is centered on the word reading aloud task performed by children in the process of reading acquisition. Three major conclusions were derived from the review: (a) generally, the collection of studies in Portuguese language confirm the assumptions of the dual-route model of word recognition; (b) Portuguese speaking children seem to prefer to use the phonological strategy in the beginning of the reading process, which is then gradually substituted by the preferential use of the lexical strategy; and (c) methodological issues have interfered in the results found by different researchers, and these are related to the manner of application of the reading task, the type of statistical analysis carried out and to the direction (from the reading or spelling standpoint) and number of categories considered in the classification of regularity of the words.
Literature review; Word recognition; Regularity effect; Frequency
