Components of Reading Ability: Multivariate Evidence for a Convergent Skills Model of Reading Development

The objectives of this series of 3 studies were (a) to evaluate whether French-speaking children mainly use phonological mediation in the first stage of reading acquisition in a silent-reading task and (b) to examine the role of phonological processing in the construction of the orthographic lexicon. Forty-eight French children were followed from kindergarten to the end of Grade 2. Their phonological skills were assessed using a semantic categorization task with homophone and visual foils (Study 1); their orthographic skills were assessed using a choice task involving a correct exemplar, a homophone, and a visual foil (Study 2). In the semantic categorization task, the differences between the visual and homophone foils increased with time, as the homophone foils were more and more likely to be chosen. In the orthographic choice task, performance improved with time, but errors were more likely to involve homophone foils. The results obtained by two subgroups of children who differed in their level of orthographic expertise at the end of Grade 2 (Study 3) indicated that, 1 year earlier (at the end of Grade I), the future "expert" spellers were more likely than the future "poor" spellers to use phonological processing in silent reading (semantic categorization task). Moreover, in Grade 1, future expert spellers' phonological skills in reading aloud and in spelling from dictation (pseudoword tasks) were better than those of future poor spellers, and future expert spellers also had better phonological awareness skills at the beginning of the last year of kindergarten. These results suggest that French-speaking children use phonological mediation in silent-reading tasks and that phonological processing contributes to the construction of the orthographic lexicon.