Phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming predicting early development in reading and spelling: Results from a cross-linguistic longitudinal study

Abstract

In this study, the relationship between latent constructs of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) were investigated and related to later measures of reading and spelling in children learning to read in different alphabetic writing systems (i.e., Norwegian/Swedish vs. English). 750 U.S./Australian children and 230 Scandinavian children were followed longitudinally between kindergarten and 2nd grade. PA and RAN were measured in kindergarten and Grade 1, while word recognition, phonological decoding, and spelling were measured in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2. In general, high stability was observed for the various reading and spelling measures, such that little additional variance was left open for PA and RAN. However, results demonstrated that RAN was more related to reading than spelling across orthographies, with the opposite pattern shown for PA. In addition, tests of measurement invariance show that the factor loadings of each observed indicator on the latent PA factor was the same across U.S./Australia and Scandinavia. Similar findings were obtained for RAN. In general, tests of structural invariance show that models of early literacy development are highly transferable across languages.

Cognitive predictors of shallow-orthography spelling speed and accuracy in 6th grade children

“…The present study differs from previous research exploring single-word spelling (Babayigit & Stainthorp, 2011;Caravolas et al, 2001;Furnes & Samuelsson, 2011;Moll et al, 2014;Nikolopoulos, Goulandris, Hulme, & Snowling, 2006) in three respects, each of which affect interpretation of findings. First, students were spelling in a shallow orthography.…”

“…First, the design of the study -multiple measures and incremental model building-makes it possible to isolate fairly precisely the effects of specific cognitive abilities, even when separate measurement tasks necessarily require a combination of these. Our failure to find RAN effects, for example, (contra Babayigit & Stainthorp, 2011;Furnes & Samuelsson, 2011) may be because in the present study the various RAN component skills were subsumed by other measures (encoding, decoding, short-term memory). Second, sizes of effect in this study may appear quite small: A standard deviation increase in word-split gave a predicted improvement in accuracy of 3%-around 1 test point.…”

The precursors of double dissociation between reading and spelling in a transparent orthography

“…doi:10.1007/s11881-016-0131-5 2017 Final Draft in a Highly Consistent Orthography Good readers tend to be good spellers, and poor readers tend to be poor spellers. Several studies have documented that reading and spelling are strongly associated with each other in different languages and age groups (e.g., Babayiğit & Stainthorp, 2010;Cardoso-Martins & Pennington, 2004;Desimoni, Scalisi, & Orsolini, 2012;Furnes & Samuelsson, 2011;Georgiou, Torppa, Manolitsis, Parrila, & Lyytinen, 2012;Landerl & Wimmer, 2008;Leppänen, Niemi, Aunola, & Nurmi, 2006;Vaessen & Blomert, 2013;Yeung et al, 2011). However, the imperfect correlation between the two (rs range from .60 to .80; see meta-analysis by Swanson, Trainin, Necoechea, & Hammill, 2003) leaves open the window for a dissociation in which good readers can also be poor spellers (known as unexpected poor spellers) and poor readers can also be good spellers (known as unexpected poor readers).…”

Comparison of performance in metalinguistic tasks among students with and without risk of dyslexia

“…This indicates a better performance average for students in the GI group, possibly due to the intervention done. In contrast, the maintenance of performance averages for students in the GII group suggests a difficulty in processing visual stimuli, which may be due to a change in the visual processing of the information, which is a difficulty found in children with dyslexia, which could justify the performance of this group 6,10,[21][22][23] .…”

“…Suggesting improved processing, access and retrieval of visual information for GI and performance maintenance, without influences from the phonological intervention program for GII (Table 5) helping, in the retention of the information in the phonological memory 6,13,20,22 . Thus, activities involving the repetition of words and not words, and the repetition of sequences, be they digits or figures, involve directly the processing auditory and/or visual of information, retention and retrieval of stored information for stimulus reproduction requested 8,10,[23][24][25] .…”