Some Predictive Antecedents of Specific Reading Disability

Abstract

This paper reports one phase of an ongoing longitudinal project designed to identify the precursors of developmental dyslexia. The present study is based on the second year follow-up of an original population of 497 white male kindergarten children administered a developmental and neuropsychological test battery in 1970, and an evaluation of the predictive accuracy of these tests to the criterion of reading level at the end of grade 1 in 1972. The results of the multivariate analyses revealed that over 90% of both the High Risk and Low Risk children were correctly classified. The results were shown to lend preliminary support for the theory and for the predictive utility of these preschool tests.