Rapid automatized naming in a developmental perspective between ages 4 and 10

Abstract

During the last decades, rapid automatized naming (RAN) has been widely examined as a predictor of reading ability, but very few studies have examined the development of RAN itself. The present study followed children from ages 4 until 10, focusing on RAN performance in a developmental perspective. Relations within and between alphanumeric and nonalphanumeric RAN were investigated both concurrently and over time. The result shows that individual differences in RAN objects are stable between ages 4 and 10, with the most rapid growth of mean performance between ages 4 and 6. Early performance on RAN objects predicts both performance on RAN digits and RAN letters at age 8 and the further development between ages 8 and 10. Further, low‐performing children at age 4 develop their performance on RAN digits and RAN letters later compared with high‐performing children, and RAN digits performance reaches a plateau earlier than RAN letters performance.

Entropy of eye movement during rapid automatized naming

“…This implies that EME might increase with the task complexity of RAN. This inference is consistent with the previous researches (Åvall et al, 2019;Georgiou and Parrila, 2020) that alphanumeric RAN (e.g., naming numbers or letters) may have higher cognitive complexity and activate a wider range of brain regions than non-alphanumeric RAN (e.g., naming colors or objects). It should be remarked (Åvall et al, 2019;Georgiou and Parrila, 2020) that alphanumeric RAN tasks are more strongly related to future reading than nonalphanumeric tasks.…”

Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) as a Kindergarten Predictor of Future Reading in English: A Systematic Review and Meta‐analysis

“…The correlations for RAN letters and RAN digits with reading were nearly identical ( r = −0.46 and r = −0.45, respectively), as were correlations for RAN colors and RAN objects with reading ( r = −0.32 and r = −0.34, respectively). Based on these values, the fact that studies find RAN digits to be automatized even earlier than letters (Åvall et al, 2019) and to be consistent with previous meta‐analyses that combined these categories (e.g., Araújo et al, 2015), we collapsed the RAN types into alphanumeric and non‐alphanumeric RAN. We then directly tested whether alphanumeric RAN was a better predictor of reading than non‐alphanumeric RAN.…”

“…Thus, for children in kindergarten or preschool who do not yet know the names of letters or digits automatically, a RAN task using colors or objects would be a better choice; once letters or digits are known with automaticity, those are a better choice for later reading prediction. To what degree a speeded naming task is automatized in young children has long been debated (e.g., Åvall et al, 2019;Wolf et al, 1986) and is not particularly testable in a meta-analysis. Nonetheless, our results clearly demonstrate that RAN, when measured at a young age, maintains its robust relationship with reading.…”

Rapid Automatized Naming as a Universal Marker of Developmental Dyslexia in Italian Monolingual and Minority-Language Children

“…The choice to use shapes was due to two different reasons: (i) the need to limit the lexical access requested by the task to few stimuli easy to back up in memory and recall, for avoiding the influence of different language proficiency levels; (ii) the need to avoid possible effects of different levels of naming automatization in bilinguals and Italian monolingual children. Note that Åvall et al (2019) observed higher automatization for alphanumeric tokens in school-age due to their salience in everyday school life. Since this effect could be affected by the access of word forms in different languages, as in bilingual readers, we preferred testing participants by using a set of generally less automatized stimuli.…”