A Longitudinal Study of Early Reading Development: Letter-Sound Knowledge, Phoneme Awareness and RAN, but Not Letter-Sound Integration, Predict Variations in Reading Development

By F. Clayton, G. West, C. Sears, Charles Hulme, Arne Lervåg. Scientific Studies of Reading, 2019

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ABSTRACT It is now widely accepted that phonological language skills are a critical foundation for learning to read (decode). This longitudinal study investigated the predictive relationship between a range of key phonological language skills and early reading development in a sample of 191 children in their first year at school. The study also explored the theory that a failure to establish automatic associations between letters and speech sounds is a proximal causal risk factor for difficulties in learning to read. Our findings show that automatic letter-sound associations are established early, but do not predict variations in reading development. In contrast, phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and alphanumeric RAN were all strong independent predictors of reading development. In addition, both phoneme awareness and RAN displayed a reciprocal relationship with reading, such that the growth of reading predicted improvements in these skills.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c586b2bf1b0eeb1885b5db48fd7e8a2472a68ce4