Development of word reading fluency and spelling in a consistent orthography: An 8-year follow-up.

Abstract

In a longitudinal study, development of word reading fluency and spelling were followed for almost 8 years. In a group of 115 students (65 girls, 50 boys) acquiring the phonologically transparent German orthography, prediction measures (letter knowledge, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and nonverbal IQ) were assessed at the beginning of Grade 1; reading fluency and spelling were tested at the end of Grade 1 as well as in Grades 4 and 8. Reading accuracy was close to ceiling in all reading assessments, such that reading fluency was not heavily influenced by differences in reading accuracy. High stability was observed for word reading fluency development. Of the dysfluent readers in Grade 1, 70% were still poor readers in Grade 8. For spelling, children who at the end of Grade 1 still had problems translating spoken words into phonologically plausible letter sequences developed problems with orthographic spelling later on. The strongest specific predictors were rapid automatized naming for reading fluency and phonological awareness for spelling. Word recognition speed was a relevant and highly stable indicator of reading skills and the only indicator that discriminated reading skill levels in consistent orthographies. Its long-term development was more strongly influenced by early naming speed than by phonological awareness.

Universal Reading Processes Are Modulated by Language and Writing System

“…By fourth grade, English language children were comparable to first graders who read the more shallow orthographies. These kinds of differences have been seen in other comparative studies (e.g., Landerl & Wimmer, 2008) that have ruled out alternative explanations for the differences.…”

Sometimes More Is Better, and Sometimes Less Is Better: Task Complexity Moderates the Response Time Accuracy Correlation

“…Goldhammer et al [1] tested these assumptions by comparing RTACs in task paradigms that due to theoretical considerations and empirical results predominantly either require automatized or controlled processing. As reading is already well automatized during primary school [15] negative RTACs were expected. Conversely, as problem solving tasks by definition require controlled processing [16,17] positive RTACs were expected.…”

Cognitive predictors of shallow-orthography spelling speed and accuracy in 6th grade children

“…Similar arguments may apply to shallow-orthography spelling-the V. Rønneberg, M. Torrance focus of the present study. A related issue is the scope of lexical and motor planningspan predicts spelling accuracy for early-primary spelling in Norwegian (Lervåg & Hulme, 2010), and early-and mid-primary children spelling in English (Caravolas et al, 2001), although it is not clear whether these effects are independent of phonemic awareness (Landerl & Wimmer, 2008).…”