The contribution of phonological awareness and visual attention in early reading and spelling (original) (raw)

The interaction between phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and naming speed in the reading and spelling performance of first-grade children

Brain and Cognition, 2003

The performance of 267 first-grade children was examined on tasks assessing phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and naming speed. The children were also given several measures of word and pseudoword reading, reading comprehension, and pseudoword and dictation spelling. A series of hierarchical analyses indicated that three variables (phonological awareness, syntactic awareness, and naming speed) were still predictors of reading and spelling performance after variance in the others had been controlled for. The results, which confirm that syntactic awareness can account for variance in written language after phonological ability had been controlled for, support the hypothesis concerning the relationships between naming-speed processes and written language, and challenge the unitary phonological theory of reading difficulty.

Naming speed and phonological awareness as predictors of reading development

Journal of Educational Psychology, 2003

This paper investigates how well individual differences in kindergarten in phonological awareness and naming speed account for subsequent reading development. We report two series of analyses from the one data set. In the first, we use regression analyses to predict subsequent reading development, with various other factors controlled. In the second series, we follow the reading development of four groups of children selected to have the various combinations of adequate or inadequate phonological awareness and naming speed in kindergarten. Considerable evidence has accumulated that phonological awareness is a key component in the development of reading ability, and that poor phonological awareness is a, or perhaps the, core deficit in reading disability (

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

Learning and Individual Differences, 2011

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.

Syllable frequency effects in visual word recognition: Developmental approach in French children

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 2010

This study investigates the syllable's role in the normal reading acquisition of French children at three grade levels (1st, 3rd, and 5th), using a modified version of Colé, Magnan, and Grainger's (1999) paradigm. We focused on the effects of syllable frequency and word frequency. The results suggest that from the first to third years of reading instruction, children process high-frequency syllables as syllable units while processing low-frequency syllables as phoneme units. In fifth graders, syllable-based processing is extended to both high and low syllable frequencies, primarily due to CVC structures with high-frequency syllables. Lexical frequency does not significantly influence syllable processing. These findings reveal that the syllable is an early prelexical unit modulated initially by syllable frequency, and subsequently by grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences. High-frequency syllables did not produce inhibitory effects. Consequently, results are compatible with Levelt and Wheeldon's (1994) mental syllabary hypothesis. Implications for specific reading training and syllable based remediation are discussed.

Predictive influence of phonological processing, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on spelling performance

Brain and Cognition, 2004

This paper focuses on the predictive influence of phonological awareness, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on spelling. The retrospective study correlated spelling performance in a group of 199 French-speaking children at the end of grade 2 with earlier capacities for phonemic manipulation, morphological/syntactic correction, and naming speed, assessed at the end of grade 1. The results are consistent with an integrative model that challenges the unitary phonological disorder hypothesis and confirmed that in French, as in other languages, naming speed is an independent predictor of reading performance.

Phonological Processing and Reading and Writing Skills in Literacy

Paidéia (Ribeirão Preto)

Studies suggest the influence of phonological processing on literacy, although there is controversy about the cognitive skills underlying this construct. This study investigated the contribution of phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid naming and visual processing in reading and writing performance of a sample of 50 students of the 3rd grade of an Elementary Public School. The results indicated that phonological awareness and phonological memory are the skills that contributed most to the initial performance in reading and writing. In respect of rapid naming, only the letters naming showed significant correlation with reading and writing and there was no correlation between visual processing and reading or writing. The exploratory factor analysis suggested the grouping of variables in three factors, the first formed by the phonological memory and phonological awareness, the second formed by the rapid naming and the third by the visual processing.

The importance of letter knowledge in the relationship between phonological awareness and reading

Journal of Research in Reading, 2004

Previous correlational and experimental research has found a positive association between phonological awareness and reading skills. This paper provides an overview of studies in this area and shows that many studies have neglected to control for extraneous variables such as ability, phonological memory, preexisting reading skills, and letter knowledge. The paper reports on the results of a longitudinal study that took account of these variables when examining the relationship between phonological awareness and reading for a group of children during their first two years at school. Children showed rhyme awareness before they began to read but were unable to perform a phoneme deletion task until after they had develope d word reading skills. Concurrent and predictive correlations between phonological awareness scores and later reading were often significant and remained so after adjusting for verbal ability or phonological memory. Controlling for letter knowledge, however, reduced most correlatio ns to nonsignificant levels. Letter Knowledge and Phonological Awareness 3 The Importance of Letter Knowledge in the Relationship between Phonological Awareness and Reading. In the past 2 5 years, numerous studies have found an association between phonological awareness and the acquisition of literacy. Studies have used many ways to assess phonological awareness but have most commonly used tests of rhyme and phoneme awareness. Correlational studies have frequently found significant concurrent and predictive relationships between rhyme awareness and literacy (e.g.

Changing relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading as children develop from beginning to skilled readers: A 5-year longitudinal study

Developmental Psychology, 1997

Relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading skills were examined in a longitudinal correlational study of 216 children. Phonological processing abilities, word-level reading skills, and vocabulary were assessed annually from kindergarten through 4th grade, as the children developed from beginning to skilled readers. Individual differences in phonological awareness were related to subsequent individual differences in word-level reading for every time period examined. Individual differences in serial naming and vocabulary were related to subsequent individual differences in word-level reading initially, but these relations faded with development. Individual differences in letter-name knowledge were related to subsequent individual differences in phonological awareness and serial naming, but there were no relations between individual differences in wordlevel reading and any subsequent phonological processing ability.

Phoneme awareness is a better predictor of early reading skill than onset-rime awareness

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 2002

We present the results of a short-term longitudinal study. Children in the early stages of learning to read (5 and 6 year olds) were administered three different tasks (deletion, oddity, and detection) tapping awareness of four phonological units (initial phoneme, final phoneme, onset, and rime). Measures of phoneme awareness were the best concurrent and longitudinal predictors of reading skill with onset-rime skills making no additional predictive contribution once phonemic skills were accounted for. The findings are related to recent controversy over the role of large versus small phonological units as predictors of children's reading skills. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)