Predicting reading ability over the long term: The changing roles of letter naming,phonological awareness and orthographic processing

A cohort of 92 children was followed through sixth grade to investigate the relationship of preschool skills and first grade phonological awareness to reading and spelling. In particular, the focus was on the changing roles of letter naming, orthographic awareness, and phonological processing in prediction, as reading experience increased. Preschool letter naming was a consistently significant predictor of reading vocabulary, reading comprehension, and spelling at each grade level, but the preschool orthographic task contributed most to reading comprehension and spelling at the higher grades. Conversely, the contribution of the first grade phonemic awareness measures to reading skills dropped sharply after third grade, although they continued to contribute to spelling prediction. When preschool precursors of phonological processing were examined, letter naming was found to be a predictor of first and third grade phonemic awareness. Findings confirm the importance of letter naming as a predictor and of the role of phonemic awareness in early reading acquisition, but also highlight the contribution of orthographic processing skills to later reading.     

Length awareness predicts spelling skills in Finnish

Abstract. The main type of phonemic analysis skill considered to affect spelling acquisition has been awareness of phoneme quality. However, it is also important to find out whether other measures of phoneme awareness might contribute to literacy acquisition. Thus, the influence of phoneme length and phoneme quality awareness on spelling in Finnish was compared. The Oddity task was used to assess phonemic awareness and spelling skills were investigated by a spelling-to-dictation task. The results showed that length awareness predicted spelling better than quality awareness did. Moreover, length awareness was more strongly related to spelling of long phonemes, which specifically require analysis of phoneme length, than to spelling of phoneme clusters not involving length analysis. Additionally, only length awareness predicted children's general spelling skills. These findings suggest that awareness of length, which is a phonemic attribute of the Finnish language, is connected to children's spelling skills more strongly than awareness of phoneme quality is.     

The role of different levels of phonological awareness in the development of reading and spelling in Greek

Phonological awareness is a strong predictor of children's progress in literacy acquisition. There are different ways of segmenting words into sound sequences – syllables, phonemes, onset-rime – and little is known about whether these different levels of segmentation vary in their contribution to reading and writing. Does one of them – for example, phoneme awareness – play the major role in learning to read and spell making the other phonological units irrelevant to the prediction of reading? Or do different levels of analysis make independent contributions to reading and spelling?

Our study investigated whether syllable and phoneme awareness make independent contributions to reading and spelling in Greek. Four measures were used: syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, reading and spelling. Analyses of variance showed that Greek speaking children found it easier to analyse words into syllables than phonemes, irrespective of the influence of task variables such as position of the phonological element, word length, and placement of stress in the word. Regression analyses showed that syllable and phoneme awareness make significant and independent contributions to learning written Greek. We conclude that phonological awareness is a multidimensional phenomenon and that the different dimensions contribute to reading and writing in Greek.

     

Phonological awareness,verbal working memory and the acquisition of literacy

This paper describes a 2-year longitudinal study of 76 initially prereading children. The study examined the relationships between phonological awareness (measured by tests of onset and rime, phonemic segmentation and phoneme deletion), verbal working memory and the development of reading and spelling. Factor analyses showed that the verbal working memory tests which were administered loaded on two distinct but highly related factors, the first of which,simple repetition, involved the repetition of verbal items exactly as spoken by the experimenter, whereas the second,backwards repetition, involved repetition of items in reverse order. Factor analyses also showed that, whist the phonological awareness variables consistently loaded on the backwards repetition factor at the beginning and end of Grade 1, by Grade 2 the phonological awareness variables loaded on a separate factor which also included sentence repetition. Results of multiple regression analyses, with reading and spelling as a compound criterion variable, indicated that phonological awareness consistently predicted later reading and spelling even when both simple and backwards repetition were controlled. In contrast, verbal working memory did not consistently predict reading and spelling across testing times. Whilst there was some indication that verbal working memory, especially backwards repetition, measured during Grade 1 did predict reading and spelling in Grade 2, these effects were no longer evident when all three phonological variables were controlled. Nevertheless, with 4 individual reading and 2 individual spelling measures as the criterion variables, it was shown that phonological awareness was not quite such a consistent predictor of reading and spelling: it was most highly related to reading pseudowords and spelling real words; but it was not so highly related to spelling pseudowords, apparently because the processing demands of the task for the young children in the study were extremely high. Given the importance of verbal working memory for the completion of phonological awareness, reading and spelling tasks, in particular for spelling pseudowords, the findings are interpreted as providing some support for a theoretical position which posits that both phonological awareness and verbal working memory contribute to the early stages of literacy acquisition. Whilst the findings suggest some support for a general underlying phonological ability, there is also evidence that, as children learn to read and write, verbal working memory and phonological awareness become more differentiated.     

Phonemic awareness development in 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children: an examination of emergent,receptive, knowledge and skills

The National Institutes of Health has deemed illiteracy a national health crisis based on reading proficiency rates among American children. In 2002, the National Early Literacy Panel identified six pre-reading skills that are most crucial precursors to reading mastery and predict future reading outcomes. Of those skills, phonological awareness, and in particular phonemic awareness, is the strongest independent predictor of early reading outcomes. However, limited research has addressed the development of these component skills due in part to the fact that many of the measures used to assess sub-skills such as phonemic awareness are oral production measures that cannot easily be administered with children under the age of five, and are not designed to detect implicit or emerging knowledge. To address this limitation, we developed and administered two receptive measures of phonemic awareness to 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children. We found evidence for the emergence of this component skill earlier in ontogeny than is currently acknowledged in the literature. Overall, children performed at above chance rates on measures of receptive phonemic awareness at the level of the individual phoneme as early as 2.5-years-old. Results are discussed in terms of the need for a paradigm shift in prevailing models of how phonological awareness develops, as well as the potential to identify children at-risk for reading failure at an earlier point in ontogeny than is currently feasible.     

The foundation of literacy skills in Korean: the relationship between letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness and their relative contribution to literacy skills

This study examined the relative contribution of letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness to literacy skills and the relationship between letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness, using data from Korean-speaking preschoolers. The results revealed that although both letter-name knowledge and phonological awareness made unique contributions to literacy skills (i.e., word reading, pseudoword reading, and spelling), letter-name knowledge played a more important role than phonological awareness in literacy acquisition in Korean. Letter-name knowledge explained appreciably greater amount of variance and had larger effect sizes in literacy skills. Furthermore, children with greater syllable, body (e.g., segmenting cat into ca-t), and phoneme awareness had higher levels of letter-name knowledge. In particular, children’s syllable awareness and body awareness were positively associated with their letter-name knowledge, even after controlling for children’s phoneme awareness. These results suggest that Korean children’s awareness of larger phonological units (i.e., syllable and body) in addition to phoneme awareness may mediate the relationship between letter-name knowledge and literacy acquisition in Korean, in contrast with previous findings in English that have demonstrated a positive relationship only between phoneme awareness and letter-name knowledge, and the hypothesis that phoneme awareness mediates the relationship between letter-name knowledge and literacy acquisition.     

Cognitive preconditions of early reading and spelling: a latent-variable approach with longitudinal data

The aim of the present study was to empirically disentangle the interdependencies of the impact of nonverbal intelligence, working memory capacities, and phonological processing skills on early reading decoding and spelling within a latent variable approach. In a sample of 127 children, these cognitive preconditions were assessed before the onset of formal education, whereas reading as well as spelling achievement was measured at the end of grade 1. The findings indicate that working memory does contribute to the prediction of early reading and spelling, and that this contribution outperforms that of general intelligence and phonological recoding from long-term memory during the early steps of reading and spelling acquisition. Moreover, the results show that phonological awareness mediates the effects of working memory capacities on early literacy outcomes. The role of working memory and phonological awareness as key cognitive preconditions of early reading and spelling are discussed.     

Considering linguistic and orthographic features in early literacy acquisition: Evidence from Korean

This study investigated (1) the role of syllable awareness in word reading and spelling after accounting for the effects of print-related skills (letter-name and letter-sound knowledge, and rapid serial naming), and (2) unique contributions of orthographic, semantic (vocabulary and morphological awareness), phonological, and print-related predictors to word reading and spelling for 4- and 5-year old Korean-speaking children (N = 168). Syllable awareness was found to be positively related to word reading and spelling after accounting for print-related skills and phoneme awareness. Letter-name knowledge and orthographic awareness were uniquely related to word reading and spelling after accounting for other language and literacy-related skills. In addition, phoneme awareness was uniquely related to spelling whereas rapid serial naming was uniquely related to word reading, after accounting for other language and literacy-related skills. Semantic knowledge such as vocabulary and morphological awareness were not related to either word reading or spelling after accounting for other language and literacy-related skills. Word reading and spelling remained uniquely and positively related to each other. These findings are discussed in light of crosslinguistic variation in early literacy acquisition.     

Phonological awareness and reading acquisition

Recent research has suggested the importance of oral language ability in learning to read. It was proposed that the young child's awareness of the phonology of his language would greatly influence early reading success. The results revealed a strong relationship between the first grader's reading performance and two measures of his phonological awareness, invented spelling and phoneme segmentation abilities. Development of phonological awareness was not related to the child's sex, intelligence, socioeconomic status, or chronological age within a 12-month span. A third measure of phonological awareness, auditory analysis skills, was found to have less predictive value. The results suggest that an understanding of phonological relationships above and beyond that required for ordinary speaking and listening enables the beginning reader of English to make contact with his alphabetic writing system at the phonemic level. Instruction at the appropriate age level should facilitate this understanding.     

The Relationship Between Phoneme Awareness and Rapid Serial Naming Skills and Literacy Acquisition: The Role of Developmental Period and Reading Ability

This study investigates the relationship between phoneme awareness and rapid naming skills and subsequent reading and spelling ability in two developmental periods: kindergarten to Grade 1 and Grade 1 to Grade 2. Two groups of children participated in the study: children at high and children at low familial risk of developmental dyslexia. The results are consistent with previous findings that both phoneme awareness and rapid naming play an important role in early literacy acquisition in an alphabetic writing system. However, relative to phoneme awareness, rapid naming plays a modest role. In this study, an unambiguous specific effect for rapid naming was found only among the children in the high-risk group. Furthermore, even among these children, the effect of rapid naming was limited to rapid naming of letters and digits and to the second developmental period investigated. The implications of these results for understanding the role played by rapid naming and phoneme awareness in alphabetic literacy acquisition are discussed.     

The transient role of explicit phonological recoding for reading acquisition

This study explores early stages of reading acquisition, specifically therelation of phoneme blending and letter recoding to individual differencesin word decoding. The hypothesis was that facility in letter recoding andaccuracy of phoneme blending are substantial components of word decodingin beginning readers but not for skilled reading and that reliance onphoneme-sized decoding of words would dissipate as reading proficiencyincreased. In four studies we examined the ability to recode letters, blendphonemes and decode words in four groups of Dutch children (early Grade1, N = 130, older Grade 1, N = 81, Grade 3, N = 54 and a group of children witha reading lag, N = 356). Phoneme blending was only related to the readingability of beginning Grade 1 children. By the end of Grade 1 ability to blendphonemes did not differentiate reading capacity, nor for older children inGrade 3 and reading disabled children. Letter recoding was related to worddecoding in all four studies, although the strength of that relation diddwindle as reading skill level increased. The results of the study appearconsistent with self teaching hypothesis and other theories that imply atransient role of explicit phonological recoding in word identification.     

Reading and spelling difficulties in high school students: Causes and consequences

Basic skills in reading and spelling and supporting metalinguistic abilities were assessed in ninth and tenth grade students in two school settings. Students attending a private high school for the learning disabled comprised one group and the other comprised low to middle range students from a public high school. Both the LD students and the regular high school students displayed deficiencies in spelling and in decoding, a factor in reading difficulty that is commonly supposed to dwindle in importance after the elementary school years. Treating the overlapping groups as a single sample, multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the contribution of nonword decoding skill and phonological and morphological awareness to spelling ability. The analysis revealed that decoding was the major component, predicting about half of the variance in spelling. The effect of phonological awareness was largely hidden by its high correlation with decoding, but was a significant predictor of spelling in its own right. Morphological awareness predicted spelling skill when the words to be spelled were morphologically complex. An additional study showed that differences in decoding and spelling ability were associated with differences in comprehension after controlling for reading experience and vocabulary. Even among experienced readers individual differences in comprehension of text reflect efficiency of phonological processing at the word level.     

The early manifestation of developmental dyslexia: Evidence from German children

The present study retrospectively examined early difficulties with phonological coding and phonemic segmentation of German children who after four years in school were diagnosed as dyslexic. German, in comparison to English, exhibits rather simple and straight-forward grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and the initial teaching approach was phonics oriented. Despite these favorable circumstances for the acquisition of phonological coding, the majority of the later dyslexic children had particular difficulties with the accurate reading of nonwords and of unfamiliar words after about seven months of reading instruction. However, there were enormous differences between the dyslexic children. Two of them were completely unable to blend phonemes into pronunciations, another seven were slow and error prone decoders, and three children had slow and laborious pronunciation assembly as the core problem. The majority of the later dyslexic children also exhibited phonemic segmentation deficits as tested with a nonword spelling task and a phoneme reversal task. In correspondence with findings from older German dyslexic children, the early difficulties with accurate phonological coding and phonemic segmentation were no longer found at the end of grade four. Children then suffered from very slow reading and poor spelling. In general, the difficulties of German dyslexic children emphasize the phonological impairment account of dyslexia. More specifically, these findings suggest that the assembly of letter sounds into pronunciations is particularly affected in the early phase of learning to read a consistent orthography.     

Developmental dyslexia in an orthography of intermediate depth: the case of European Portuguese

Fifteen Portuguese children with dyslexia, aged 9–11 years, were compared with reading and chronological age controls with respect to five indicators related to the phonological deficit hypothesis: the effects of lexicality, regularity, and length, implicit and explicit phonological awareness, and rapid naming. The comparison between groups indicates that Portuguese children with dyslexia have a phonological impairment which is revealed by a developmental deficit in implicit phonological awareness and irregular word reading (where younger reading level controls performed better than dyslexics) and by a developmental delay in decoding ability and explicit phonological awareness (where dyslexics matched reading level controls). These results are discussed in relation to the idea that European Portuguese is written in an orthography of intermediate depth.     

Comparing the phonological and double deficit hypotheses for developmental dyslexia

This study tested the predictions of thephonological and double deficit hypotheses byexperimentally examining speech perception,phoneme awareness, lexical retrieval (serialand discrete), articulatory speed, and verbalSTM in school age child (N = 35) and adolescent(N = 36) dyslexics, and both chronological age(CA) and reading age (RA) controls. Theresults confirmed the findings of previousstudies of a deficit in phoneme awareness indevelopmental dyslexia. At both age levels,dyslexics performed significantly more poorlythan both their CA and RA controls. Althoughdeficits in the other processes investigated,particularly in rapid serial naming, were alsoapparent, they were not as clear-cut as thedeficit in phoneme awareness. In general,definite evidence of a deficit in rapid serialnaming was limited to the more severelyimpaired dyslexics. Furthermore, although rapidserial naming contributed independent variationto various literacy skills, its contributionwas modest relative to the contribution ofphoneme awareness, regardless of whether theliteracy skill relied more or less heavily onphonological or orthographic coding skills. Further analyses suggested that variation inrapid serial skill is particularly importantfor fluent reading of text, whereas phonemeawareness is particularly important for thedevelopment of the ability to read byphonologically recoding letters or groups ofletters in words into their phonological codes.This explains the relatively strongcontribution of phoneme awareness to readingand spelling ability in general. In sum, thephonological hypothesis offers a moreparsimonious account of the present resultsthan the double deficit hypothesis.     

A Window Into Early Literacy: Exploring the Cognitive and Linguistic Underpinnings of Invented Spelling

Children's early spelling attempts (invented spellings) and underlying component skills were evaluated in a sample (N = 115) of 5-year-old children. Letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness were shown to be important predictors of invented spelling performance in this age group. The results also showed associations between invented spelling and measures of orthographic awareness and morphological processing. The findings support the view that invented spelling is a developmentally complex and important early literacy skill that involves phonemic awareness, letter sound knowledge, and other oral language skills and orthographic knowledge.     

Patterns of phonological and memory processing in beginning readers and spellers of Greek

This study examined the patterns of reading and spelling performance of first-grade Greek children who either were facing difficulties in literacy acquisition or were normal achievers. In addition, we studied the relationship between obtained literacy development levels and the children's phonological awareness and ability to retain phonological information in short-term memory. The participants were tested in the reading of single letters, letter clusters, words, and nonwords, as well as in word and nonword spelling. Furthermore, their phonological processing knowledge was assessed via a battery of phonological awareness tasks and short-term memory phonetic-representation tasks. The main findings of the study were as follows: (a) Accurate decoding of Greek was achieved by almost every young child (attributed mainly to the nature of the Greek writing system); (b) the time the children needed to process a written item was the crucial index of their difficulty in literacy acquisition; (c) spelling was performed by deriving the orthographic form of a word on the basis of sound-spelling correspondence knowledge; (d) although the children with difficulties in literacy development had achieved a satisfactory performance in phonological processing, their performance was nevertheless significantly lower than that of the normal achievers; and (e) phonemic awareness and speech rate tasks were among the best predictors of learning to read and spell Greek words.     

Predictors of early versus later spelling development in Danish

The present study examined phoneme awareness, phonological short term memory, letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual–verbal paired associate learning (PAL) as longitudinal predictors of spelling skills in an early phase (Grade 2) and a later phase (Grade 5) of development in a sample of 140 children learning to spell in the opaque Danish orthography. Important features of the study were the inclusion of PAL measures and the fact that the children were followed up to Grade 5. Findings from other orthographies were replicated, in that phonological processing (awareness and memory) and RAN accounted for unique variance in early spelling skills. For later spelling skills, Grade 2 spelling was by far the most powerful predictor. PAL-nonwords was the only measure to explain additional unique variance. It is suggested that PAL-nonwords taps the ability to establish representations of new phonological forms and that this ability is important for the acquisition of orthographic spelling knowledge.     

One complicated extended family: the influence of alphabetic knowledge and vocabulary on phonemic awareness

This research evaluated possible sources of individual differences in early explicit, smaller segment phonological awareness. In particular, the unique contributions of oral vocabulary and alphabetic knowledge to phonemic awareness acquisition were examined across the first year of school. A total of 57 participants were tested in kindergarten (mean age 5 years, 8 months) and again 1 year later midway through Grade 1. Results revealed that oral vocabulary and alphabetic knowledge were correlated with concurrent larger segment phonological awareness and phonemic blending in kindergarten whereas oral vocabulary was the only measure that predicted unique variance in phonemic awareness into Grade 1. Further, this pattern of results was most pronounced for analytic (segmenting), as opposed to synthetic (blending), phonemic awareness. These results highlight the importance of different component processes to explicit, smaller segment awareness depending upon the developmental period under study and also accentuate the need to separate analytic from synthetic phonemic awareness in literacy research.