International audienceWe reported the results of two studies on the early predictors of future reading skills. The main goal of the first study was to examine whether reading level at age 8 can be predicted on the basis of a skill very rarely examined in longitudinal studies: phonemic discrimination. Two groups of French-speaking children were selected based on their phonemic discrimination skills at age 5: a group with low skills and a group with average to high skills in that domain. These two groups were respectively classified as being "at-risk" and "not-at-risk" for reading acquisition, and were matched on chronological age, nonverbal IQ and vocabulary. Phonemic discrimination was found to be an important predictor of reading acquisition. Indeed, the two groups defined at age 5 based on their phonemic discrimination skills obtained significantly different reading scores at age 8, and the proportion of children with reading disabilities was higher in the at-risk group than in the not-at-risk group. The main goal of the second study was to assess whether reading skills at age 8 could be predicted by the "classical" predictors of reading acquisition assessed at age 5: pre-reading level, letter-name knowledge, phonemic segmentation and phonological short-term-memory (STM). A high proportion of the variance in reading at age 8 (52.8%) was predicted by these predictors, with four contributing unique and significant portions of that variance: pre-reading level, letter-name knowledge for vowels (not for consonants), phonemic segmentation (not syllabic segmentation) and phonological STM

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Using facial gestures (especially lip reading) is known to improve speech comprehension. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, most teachers wear masks. This can affect learning to read, especially for children with poor phonemic discrimination skills. In this study, a group of children at risk for reading failure and a not at risk group were assessed from age 5 to 7. These two groups were formed according to their scores on a phonemic discrimination test at age 5: the "Atrisk group" (N = 39) and the "Not-at-risk group" (N = 46). To test the effect of not being able to rely on lip reading on the phonemic test, a syllabic counting task was given to the same groups of children at age 5 and 7 under two conditions: with the possibility to read lips or without (the stimuli were either pronounced by the experimenter or pre-recorded with no visual component). The results revealed a positive effect of lip-reading condition only for the at-risk group at both ages, with scores which remained similar over time. By contrast, scores for the not-at-risk group increased between the two ages, whatever the lip-reading condition. These results suggest that in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in which teachers wear masks, this condition may interfere with learning to read for children at risk due to poor phonemic discrimination skills.