Orthographic knowledge predicts reading and spelling skills over and above general intelligence and phonological awareness

Abstract

It is widely accepted that general intelligence and phonological awareness contribute to children's acquisition of reading and spelling skills. A further candidate in this regard is orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge about permissible letter patterns). It consists of two components, word-specific (i.e., the knowledge of the spelling of specific words) and general orthographic knowledge (i.e., the knowledge about legal letter patterns of a writing system). Among German students, previous studies have shown that word-specific orthographic knowledge contributes to both reading and spelling. The results regarding general orthographic knowledge and its contribution to reading and spelling are inconsistent. The major goal of the present study was to determine the incremental predictive value of orthographic knowledge for reading and spelling skills among German elementary-school children (N = 66), over and above the contribution of general intelligence and phonological awareness. The second goal was to examine whether there is a difference between the two subtypes of orthographic knowledge in the amount of their respective contribution to reading and spelling performance. The results show that word-specific as well as general orthographic knowledge contribute to both reading and spelling performance, over and above intelligence and phonological awareness. Furthermore, it reveals that both word-specific and general orthographic knowledge explain more variance of spelling compared to reading. Possible explanations for these results, limitations, and implications of the study are being discussed.

Reading comprehension on word- and sentence-level can be predicted by orthographic knowledge for German children with poor reading proficiency

“…Since word-specific and general orthographic knowledge seem to play an important role in word-identification, it can be assumed that children with low reading proficiency use their orthographic knowledge when reading single words. Therefore, in line with previous results (e.g., Rothe et al, 2015;Zarić et al, 2020), we hypothesize that word-specific and general orthographic knowledge contribute significantly to reading at word-level, over and above the contribution of phonological awareness and naming speed in poor readers.…”

“…In this study, however, only one task measuring orthographic knowledge at the general level (i.e., the knowledge about frequent and infrequent double consonants) was used. Another study conducted in German by Zarić et al (2020), however, reported that word-specific and general orthographic knowledge show significant correlations with reading at word-, sentence, and textlevel. Moreover, the analyses have shown that both word-specific and general orthographic knowledge are significant predictors for reading at word-level, as well as at sentence-and text-level in German 3 rd graders without reading difficulties.…”

“…To sum up, it still remains unclear whether orthographic knowledge with its two components (i.e., word-specific and general) contributes to sentence-and textlevel reading in German. Furthermore, the previous studies regarding the contribution of word-specific and general orthographic knowledge at sentence-and textlevel reading in German examined typical readers (Ise et al, 2014;Zarić et al, 2020). Therefore, it is still unclear whether both subtypes of orthographic knowledge (i.e., word-specific and general) also contribute to reading at sentence-and text-level in German poor readers.…”

“…In previous studies examining the role of orthographic knowledge in reading performance, typical tasks used to measure reading skills included real word/pseudoword reading and/or reading fluency, however, without including any higher reading processes, such as reading comprehension (Apel et al, 2018). To our knowledge, there are only few studies examining the relationship between orthographic knowledge and both reading at word-level and sentenceand/or text-level simultaneously in transparent languages with relatively consistent letter-to-sound-correspondences, such as German (e.g., Ise, Arnoldi, & Schulte-Körne, 2014;Zarić, Hasselhorn, & Nagler, 2020). Ise et al (2014) have shown no significant correlations between orthographic knowledge and reading speed and comprehension in children from kindergarten to 2nd grade.…”

“…Word-specific and general orthographic knowledge, on the contrary, were mostly examined in basic reading skills (i.e., word and/or pseudoword reading; e.g., Conrad et al, 2013;Rothe et al, 2015). Regarding higher reading skills (i.e., sentence-and text-level reading), mixed results were reported (Ise et al, 2014;Zarić et al, 2020).…”