UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming as longitudinal predictors of reading in five alphabetic orthographies with varying degrees of consistency Landerl,

Although phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) are confirmed as early predictors of reading in a large number of orthographies, it is as yet unclear whether the predictive patterns are universal or language specific. This was examined in a longitudinal study across Grades 1 and 2 with 1,120 children acquiring one of five alphabetic orthographies with different degrees of orthographic complexity (English, French, German, Dutch, and Greek). Path analyses revealed that a universal model could not be confirmed. When we specified the best-fitting model separately for each language, RAN was a consistent predictor of reading fluency in all orthographies, whereas the association between PA and reading was complex and mostly interactive. We conclude that RAN taps into a language-universal cognitive mechanism that is involved in reading alphabetic orthographies (independent of complexity), whereas the PA–reading relationship depends on many factors like task characteristics, developmental status, and orthographic complexity. Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have consistently been found to be closely associated with children’s reading development explaining unique variance in children’s reading skills above and beyond general factors like age and nonverbal IQ (Araújo, Reis, Petersson, & Faísca, 2015; Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012; Norton & Wolf, 2012). PA refers to the ability to identify and manipulate phonological segments in spoken words, and RAN denotes the ability to name serial displays of letters, digits, pictured objects, or colors as quickly as possible. PA is important as all orthographic systems represent phonological units in one way or another. Children with deficient access to the relevant phonological units will have problems to fully understand the mappings between a certain spoken language and its orthography and training of PA seems to improve reading outcomes (e.g., Suggate, 2016). An important and as yet unresolved issue is whether PA precedes reading acquisition or whether it evolves as a consequence or during the course of learning to read (Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Hulme, Snowling, Caravolas, & Carroll, 2005; Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979). Although studies with illiterate adults indicate that PA is a consequence of literacy learning (e.g., Morais et al., 1979; for a review, see Dehaene, Cohen, Morais, & Kolinsky, 2015), longitudinal studies have suggested the opposite (e.g., Caravolas et al., 2012). A major methodological limitation of longitudinal studies showing an CONTACT Karin Landerl Karin.Landerl@uni-graz.at Institute of Psychology, University of Graz, Universitätsplatz 2, 8010 Graz, Austria. Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline. com/hssr. © 2018 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. SCIENTIFIC STUDIES OF READING 2019, VOL. 23, NO. 3, 220–234 https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2018. 1510936 association of preschool PA with later reading is that early reading abilities at the first assessment point were typically not assessed. Thus, it is unclear whether the association between early PA and later reading results from children who already have basic reading skills at the first assessment and who perform well on the PA tasks. For example, Wimmer, Landerl, Linortner, and Hummer (1991) showed that at study onset, 16 of 23 early readers (about 70%) scored at ceiling in a phoneme awareness task, whereas only 10% of the 105 nonreaders reached such high scores. Neglecting the fact that a certain percentage of children can read at the onset of schooling may induce faulty interpretations of predictive patterns. Although RAN is sometimes interpreted as also reflecting phonological processing (Savage, Pillay, & Melidona, 2007), Wolf and Bowers (1999) claimed that it constitutes a separate construct that is related to reading independently. The mechanisms underlying the well-documented RAN–reading relationship are less clear and a subject of debate (Jones, Snowling, & Moll, 2016; Lervåg & Hulme, 2009; Poulsen, Juul, & Elbro, 2015; Protopapas, Altani, & Georgiou, 2013b). The different perspectives largely converge in assuming that sequential naming mimics the timely integration of visual and verbal skills required during efficient word recognition and allows simultaneous processing of multiple stimuli presented in serial fashion, which explains why RAN exerts its strongest effects on reading fluency (Kirby, Georgiou, Martinussen, & Parrila, 2010). In summary, PA and RAN reflect two distinctive verbal abilities that help children to comprehend and automatize the mappings between their spoken language and the writing system they acquire. Although significant associations between these predictors and reading have been reported in different orthographies (e.g., Dutch: De Jong, 2011; Finnish: Torppa et al., 2013; French: Plaza & Cohen, 2007; German: Moll, Fussenegger, Willburger, & Landerl, 2009; Greek: Protopapas, Altani, & Georgiou, 2013a; Spanish: Rodríguez, van den Boer, Jiménez, & de Jong, 2015; Chinese: Song, Georgiou, Su, & Shu, 2016), the majority of studies have been conducted with children acquiring the English writing system (see the recent meta-analysis by Araújo et al., 2015). These studies have typically investigated the prediction of reading accuracy, whereas in more consistent orthographies, reading fluency is the central dependent measure, as even very young and deficient readers tend to make few reading errors (e.g., Diamanti, Goulandris, Campbell, & Protopapas, 2018; Gangl et al., 2018; Wimmer, 2006; but see van Viersen et al., 2018). English orthography is atypically complex and has been demonstrated to be harder to acquire than other more transparent orthographies (Caravolas, Lervåg, Defior, Seidlová Málková, & Hulme, 2013; Frith, Wimmer, & Landerl, 1998; Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). Given the unique complexities of English orthography, it needs to be investigated whether the predictive patterns found for English can be generalized to other languages and their writing systems. The orthographic depth hypothesis postulates that English is hard to learn because it is a deep orthography representing morphological rather than phonological units (Katz & Frost, 1992; see also Venezky, 1970). The fact that English spellings have over time evolved to represent morphology, etymology, and phonology in a complex combination (Bowers & Bowers, 2017) has resulted in a situation where most other alphabetic orthographies represent the phonological structure of spoken language in a more transparent and consistent way. Orthographies that represent the phonemic structure consistently make it relatively easy for young children to work out the mappings between graphemes and phonemes. English represents the phoneme level only inconsistently, whereas more consistent relationships can be found for larger phonological grain sizes like rime units. The psycholinguistic grain-size hypothesis (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) proposes that identifying and applying these units of variable size and their complex print-to-sound mappings is more difficult than being able to consistently rely on the phonemic level. Although a universal view of reading development would let us expect similar predictive patterns across orthographies, these cross-linguistic theories of reading development would predict that the relevance of, and interplay between, cognitive predictors may vary depending on the structure of the particular orthography. In particular, the variability in children’s ability to access phonological units of the spoken language might account for more variance in deep orthographies with large grain sizes SCIENTIFIC STUDIES OF READING 221