Longitudinal Stability of Reading-Related Skills and Their Prediction of Reading Development

Abstract

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension for 324 children at a mean age of 16 were predicted from their reading-related skills (phoneme awareness, phonological decoding, rapid naming and IQ) at a mean age of 10 years, after controlling the predictors for the autoregressive effects of the correlated reading skills. There were significant and longitudinally stable individual differences for all four reading-related skills that were independent from each of the reading and spelling skills. Yet the only significant longitudinal prediction of reading skills was from IQ at mean age 10 for reading comprehension at mean age 16. The extremely high longitudinal latent-trait stability correlations for individual differences in word recognition (.98) and spelling (.95) left little independent outcome variance that could be predicted by the reading-related skills. We discuss the practical and theoretical importance of these results and why they differ from studies of younger children.

Longitudinal Stability of Phonological and Surface Subtypes of Developmental Dyslexia

“…Because the stability of psychometric dyslexia itself was so high, we know that the reading skills of the large majority of individuals with dyslexia remain far behind. This conclusion agrees with previous work based on data from this same sample across the full range of individual differences (Hulslander et al, 2010). …”

“…A complementary question concerns the stability of reading-related constructs across the full range of individual differences. Previous research in the current sample used a structural equation modeling approach to demonstrate that individual differences in single word reading, phonological decoding, and orthographic skills were extremely stable over five years, as were their relations to one another (Hulslander, Olson, Willcutt, & Wadsworth, 2010). However, it does not necessarily follow that patterns within individuals failing at one end of the distribution remain constant with development (Pennington et al, 2012).…”

Effects of immigrant background on text comprehension, vocabulary, and reading motivation: A longitudinal study

“…Fig. 1; cf., Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997;Hulslander, Olson, Willcutt, & Wadsworth, 2010). This can be attributed in part to the relatively small number of items that may, in turn, have caused a reduction in reliability.…”

Computer instruction in handwriting, spelling, and composing for students with specific learning disabilities in grades 4–9

“…Although spell checks flag typos, writers still have to draw on their knowledge of word-specific spellings (Olson, Forsberg, Wise, & Rack, 1994) to choose the correct spelling from a list of possible spellings. That knowledge, which is based on which specific letter sequences are associated with specific morphological forms, word pronunciations, and meanings, facilitates both spelling and reading (Ehri, 1980a, 1980b; Hulslander, Olson, Willcutt, & Wadsworth, 2010). A recent metaanalysis has shown that explicit spelling instruction facilitates spelling and other writing skills as well as reading (Graham & Santangelo, 2014).…”