Features predicting item difficulty in English and Spanish elision task

Abstract

Phonological awareness (PA) is a foundational skill in early literacy acquisition across languages, including English and Spanish. While previous research has explored how factors such as word structure, phoneme characteristics, syllable stress, and syllable complexity influence PA item difficulty, the relative impact of these features—and how they may operate similarly or differently across languages—remains insufficiently understood. This study investigated the linguistic and task-format features that contribute to item difficulty in an elision task and compares these effects in English and Spanish. Using adaptive LASSO regression and dominance analysis, the study identified three significant predictors of item difficulty in English and six in Spanish. In both languages, the medial position of the deleted segment and the use of expressive response formats are the strongest predictors of increased item difficulty. In Spanish, items that produce nonwords involve longer phonological structures or require syllable deletion are associated with higher difficulty, whereas initial segment deletion tends to be easier. For English, word-level elision is associated with lower difficulty. Together, these findings highlight important considerations for designing more linguistically sensitive PA assessments in both English and Spanish.