The relations of early phonological awareness, rapid‐naming and speed of processing with the development of spelling and reading: a longitudinal examination

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Phonological awareness has been found to be strongly related to spelling. Findings on the relations between rapid‐naming and spelling are less consistent and have been suggested to be shared with speed of processing. This study set out to examine these relations in spelling and reading of Hebrew. Children attending the regular educational system were followed longitudinally (N = 70): phonological awareness, rapid‐naming and speed of processing were tested in kindergarten and in grade 1, and spelling and reading were tested in grade 2. Kindergarten and grade 1 rapid‐naming predicted spelling and word reading, and grade 1 phonological awareness predicted spelling, word reading and decoding. Speed of processing was an insignificant predictor. The findings extend the role of phonological awareness in spelling to an orthography with partial phonological representations and concurrently suggest weak relations. The results further suggest a link between rapid‐naming and orthographic knowledge, which may not be explained by shared variance with speed of processing.
What is already known about this topic

Findings point to an important role of phonological awareness and rapid‐naming (RAN) in predicting the variance in reading development.
Less is known on the relations between early cognitive skills and spelling development.
As reading and spelling were found to be dissociated, this study set out to examine the relations of early phonological awareness, RAN and speed of processing (due to its relations with RAN) and spelling development.

What this paper adds

Spelling of Hebrew was tested, which may impose reduced demands of phonological processing compared to spelling of other orthographies.
Despite rather weak relations, grade 1 phonological awareness still predicted Hebrew spelling.
RAN (in kindergarten and in grade 1) predicted the variance in spelling and in reading of real words in grade 2.
Decoding was predicted by grade 1 phonological awareness alone.

Implications for theory, policy or practice

Phonological awareness is relevant to spelling of orthographies with varying degrees of phonological representations.
The results are in line with the hypothesis that RAN is related to orthographic representations.
The results suggest an important role of RAN in pre‐school assessment of literacy‐related skills.