The Role of Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming in the Prediction of Reading Difficulties in Portuguese

Abstract

This study investigated the contribution of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) to the persistence of beginning reading diffi culties in Portuguese. The study was longitudinal and involved 13 children who had shown little progress in learning to read during their 1st school year, and 13 children with typical reading development. At the beginning of the study, when participants were, on average, six years and nine months of age, their ability to read and spell words, and their PA and RAN skills were assessed. One year later, the children who had shown diffi culties in learning to read were divided into two groups, based on their progress in learning to read during the course of the study: a group with persistent reading diffi culties and a group whose diffi culties had been overcome. Results showed that both groups performed equally poorly and below controls on the PA tasks at the beginning of the study. In contrast, only the children with persistent reading diffi culties performed more poorly than controls on the RAN tasks at that time. Keywords: Predictors of reading ability, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming. ResumoEste estudo investigou a contribuição da consciência fonológica (CF) e da nomeação automatizada rápida (RAN) para a persistência de difi culdades na aprendizagem inicial da leitura em português. O estudo foi longitudinal e envolveu 13 crianças que haviam apresentado difi culdades na aprendizagem da leitura durante o ano da alfabetização e 13 crianças com desenvolvimento típico da leitura. A habilidade de ler e escrever palavras, a CF e a RAN foram avaliadas no fi nal do ano de alfabetização, quando as crianças tinham, em média, seis anos e nove meses de idade. Um ano mais tarde, as crianças que haviam apresentado difi culdades na alfabetização foram divididas em dois grupos, com base em seu progresso na habilidade de ler palavras ao longo estudo: um grupo de crianças com difi culdades persistentes e um grupo cujas difi culdades iniciais haviam sido superadas. Os resultados mostraram que ambos os grupos apresentaram défi cits na CF no início do estudo. Por outro lado, apenas as crianças com difi culdades persistentes de leitura manifestaram défi cits na RAN naquela ocasião. Palavras-chave: Preditores da habilidade de leitura, consciência fonológica, nomeação automatizada rápida.

Rapid Automatized Naming and Explicit Phonological Processing in Children With Developmental Dyslexia: A Study With Portuguese-Speaking Children in Brazil

“…This finding indicates that RAN abilities are capable of discriminating children with dyslexia from controls. Similar conclusions were obtained in other studies with readers of Brazilian Portuguese showing that RAN is a valid tool for the identification of individuals at risk for reading difficulties (Justi and Cunha, 2016), as well as for children and adolescents with reading impairments (Lima et al, 2008;Capellini and Conrado, 2009;Bicalho and Alves, 2010;Capellini and Lanza, 2010;Germano et al, 2012;Silva et al, 2012;Michalick-Triginelli and Cardoso-Martins, 2015). As Portuguese is considered an intermediate orthography in terms of regularity, these findings give support to the position that RAN deficits might not be affected by the transparency of the writing system (Araújo and Faísca, 2019;Landerl et al, 2019).…”

“…Given recent findings indicating that RAN deficits might represent a prime characteristic of reading difficulties (de Jong and van der Leij, 2003;Bicalho and Alves, 2010;Capellini and Lanza, 2010;Georgiou et al, 2012;Germano et al, 2012;Michalick-Triginelli and Cardoso-Martins, 2015;Araújo and Faísca, 2019), we had a specific interest in exploring whether children with a clinical diagnosis of dyslexia in Brazil would present deficits in rapid naming. Findings were straightforward.…”

“…Although RAN and phonological awareness have been extensively studied in children learning to read in English, considerably fewer studies have focused on other languages and literacy instruction contexts. Findings from a recent study in Brazil have shown that deficits in both phonological awareness and RAN were associated with persistent reading difficulties in a group of children showing little progress in learning to read in the early school years (Michalick-Triginelli and Cardoso-Martins, 2015). In the current study, we explored RAN and explicit phonological processing in a group of children with a clinical diagnosis of dyslexia from Brazil who were learning to read in Portuguese.…”

The Contribution of Rapid Automatized Naming Skills and Phonological Awareness to Arabic Language Reading Fluency: A Path Analysis

“…Rapid Automatic Naming emerges as an important predictor of reading in these easy-to-orthographic languages (Michalick-Triginelli & Cardoso-Martins, 2015). RAN consists of tasks that require naming familiar items (objects, colors, letters, or digits).…”