This work aims at analyzing the cognitive operation relations and the dominion of the metalinguistic abilities with the formal reading learning process during the school's first year. The metalinguistic abilities imply the conscientious reflection upon the different levels from the linguistic system and they are developed during childhood, perfecting itself with the schooling process. The cognitive operation involves necessary processes to perceive, select, process and store information, which are relevant tasks in a complex process like reading. A total of 127 primary education students from the Basic cycle first year of two public and two private schools of Mar del Plata city, Argentina, were evaluated with psychological instruments to determine their performances in memory, awareness, executive functions, reasoning, metalinguistic abilities and reading. The results indicate that both the mental processes and the metalinguistic abilities are associated significantly to the performance in different reading measures. The conclusions discuss these relations and highlight the individual factors influence in the process of reading learning.
Cognitive processes; metalinguistic abilities; reading; learning
