Common Patterns of Prediction of Literacy Development in Different Alphabetic Orthographies

TLDR

Prior research identifies phoneme awareness, letter‑sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming, and verbal memory span as reliable predictors of reading acquisition in English, yet their relative importance across languages remains unclear. This study examines whether these predictors maintain similar predictive power across English, Spanish, Slovak, and Czech by conducting a 10‑month longitudinal investigation beginning at the onset of formal literacy instruction. The authors followed children over 10 months, measuring phoneme awareness, letter‑sound knowledge, RAN, and verbal memory span at instruction onset and tracking subsequent reading and spelling development in the four languages. Path analyses showed that phoneme awareness, letter‑sound knowledge, and RAN—but not verbal memory span—measured at instruction onset reliably predicted later reading and spelling across all four orthographies, suggesting these skills tap common cognitive processes essential for literacy learning.

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and verbal memory span are reliable correlates of learning to read in English. However, the extent to which these different predictors have the same relative importance in different languages remains uncertain. In this article, we present the results from a 10-month longitudinal study that began just before or soon after the start of formal literacy instruction in four languages (English, Spanish, Slovak, and Czech). Longitudinal path analyses showed that phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN (but not verbal memory span) measured at the onset of literacy instruction were reliable predictors, with similar relative importance, of later reading and spelling skills across the four languages. These data support the suggestion that in all alphabetic orthographies, phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, and RAN may tap cognitive processes that are important for learning to read.