There is increasing evidence for an association between both serial order short-term memory (STM) and the long-term learning (LTL) of serial order information and reading abilities. In this developmental study, we examined the hypothesis that STM for serial order supports online grapheme-to-phoneme conversion processes during the initial stages of…

This study examines the concurrent relationships between phoneme awareness, visual-verbal paired-associate learning, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and reading skills in 7- to 11-year-old children. Path analyses showed that visual-verbal paired-associate learning and RAN, but not phoneme awareness, were unique predictors of word recognition,…

We examined the longitudinal predictors of nonword decoding, reading fluency, and spelling in three languages that vary in orthographic depth: Finnish, Greek, and English. Eighty-two English-speaking, 70 Greek, and 88 Finnish children were followed from the age of 5.5 years old until Grade 2. Prior to any reading instruction, they were…

English language predictors of English and French reading development were investigated in a group of 140 children who were enrolled in French immersion programs. Children were first tested in kindergarten, and their reading achievement was tested yearly in both English and French from Grades 1 to 3, with word-level and passage-level measures that…

Gives children (ages 5+ to 9+) four tests of phonological skill to investigate relationships between these measures and their predictive relationship with reading and spelling ability. Finds performance at phonemic segmentation, rhyme sound categorization, and alliteration sound categorization improved with age, but all groups performed onset-rime…

Investigates the use of orthographic analogies in 6-year-olds. Notes that neither rime nor phoneme awareness measures were correlated with rime inference uses and that vowel, but not rime inference, was correlated with scaffolding errors. Finds that rime detection was the strongest predictor of reading ability, whereas phoneme segmentation was the…

A functional prediction scheme was sought for use in kindergarten which would have good predictive power for future reading achievement and be easy and quick to administer and score, inexpensive, and conducive to classroom use. A group of 21 kindergarten children was tested for reading readiness, intelligence, and psycholinguistic ability. Their…

A follow-on study was conducted on first-grade and third-grade children who were tested on a word identification measure of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test. Results found decoding strategy was highly correlated with concurrent reading test scores. Use of phonetic decoding was a strong positive predictor and whole word decoding a negative…

Three longitudinal studies involving kindergartners are presented that attempt to measure variance in the quality of phonological structures within lexical items using three tasks: non-word repetition, cued word fluency, and a gated auditory word recognition task. Nonword repetition was a consistent predictor of later phonological awareness.…

A 2-year longitudinal study investigated the causal contributions of phonological processing to early reading competency. Subjects, 161 kindergarten children, were tested with a battery of measures assessing letter knowledge, reading ability, and 5 phonological constructs: rapid naming ability, rhyming ability, phonological memory (successive…

Review of the contribution of various oral language abilities to early reading performances found that, although phonemic awareness was the best predictor of early reading skills, metasyntactic ability also often accounted for significant variance. Once children acquire initial decoding skills, narrative discourse and other metalinguistic skills…

This study examined the development of reading and phonological processing abilities of 209 first graders assessed at the beginning and end of the school year. The discriminant analysis, based on reading and intelligence data, correctly identified later group membership (students with and without reading disabilities and "garden variety" poor…

Two cohorts of preschool children (n=238) were followed to determine whether tests of phonological awareness, orthographic processing, and serial-naming speed, added to a preschool battery, would improve prediction of reading. The major predictors of first-grade reading and spelling were preschool letter-naming and sentence memory for both…

Forty children (ages five to nine) with or without reading disabilities, matched for mental age or reading age, completed a phoneme-grapheme learning task. Reading-disabled children took more trials than controls to learn correspondence pairs. Performance on the phonological processing task of short-term memory was the best predictor of overall…

This longitudinal study examined predictors of second-grade reading outcomes in kindergarten children (N=604). Findings indicated that five kindergarten variables uniquely predicted reading outcomes in second grade: (1) letter identification, (2) sentence imitation, (3) phonological awareness, (4) rapid naming, and (5) mother's education.…