The contribution of orthographic and phonological processes to word reading in young Norwegian readers

The dissociation between phonological and orthographic processes in word reading was investigated in a study involving 147 children in grade 3. The criterion measure was a timed word reading test. Two tasks assessed phonological skills and two tasks assessed orthographical skills. Orthographic ability accounted for variance in word reading even after phonological ability had been controlled. Poor readers differed from skilled readers in the way phonological and orthographic factors were balanced. The relationship between the two factors was fairly strong among poor readers, whereas the correlation was low for more skilled readers. Furthermore, phonological factors played a much stronger role in explaining the variance in word reading among poor readers, while on the other hand, orthographic factors were more powerful among skilled readers.     

Components of phonological awareness

The factorial structure underlying different types of tasks within the domain of phonological awareness was examined in two studies. Large sample sizes allowed for sensitive differentiation of constructs. In the first study, 128 preschool children without any experience of formal reading instruction were tested with a battery of tasks intended to tap various aspects of phonological awareness: rhyme recognition, syllable counting, initial-phoneme matching, initial-phoneme deletion, phoneme blending, and phoneme counting. Three basic components were extracted in a principal component analysis: a phoneme factor, a syllable factor and a rhyme factor. Cross-tabulations indicated considerable dissociation between performance on phoneme, syllable, and rhyme tasks. The structural relationships were replicated on a much larger sample (n=1509) in the second study. Subjects in this study were one year older and were attending grade 1 thus providing an opportunity to test their reading achievement. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated that the phonemic factor was by far the most potent predictor. However, the rhyming factor made an independent (although small) contribution to explaining the reading variance. Among the phonemic tasks, phoneme identification proved to be the most powerful predictor.