Phonological Awareness and Rapid Automatized Naming Are Independent Phonological Competencies With Specific Impacts on Word Reading and Spelling: An Intervention Study

Abstract

Phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) have been shown to be powerful predictors of reading achievement across many languages. However, literature remains unclear: (a) whether RAN is independent of PA, (b) about the specific influences of PA and RAN on reading and spelling, and (c) about the efficacy of a RAN intervention. This study aims to address these issues by means of an intervention design. Precisely, the objectives are (a) to determine whether training one competence involves or not an effect on the other, (b) to examine whether each intervention based on oral abilities (PA vs. RAN) could improve word reading and word spelling performances, and (c) to assess the efficacy of a RAN-objects’ intervention. Thirty-six French-speaking second graders, from two Belgian elementary schools, were divided into two groups, and received either a PA- or a RAN-objects’ intervention. Twenty-five-minute lessons took place at school twice a week over a period of 2 months. Both groups were compared on multiple experimental measures (PA, RAN, word reading, and word spelling), before and immediately after the intervention, and 6 months later. Results showed specific efficacy of the two interventions, with participants trained in one ability outperforming those from the other group on this specific ability at post-test. Moreover, the PA intervention revealed transfer effects on the sub-lexical processes of spelling, while the RAN intervention enhanced word reading speed. Finally, the results demonstrated the efficacy of a RAN-objects’ intervention for the first time. These findings provide a new piece of evidence showing the independence of PA and RAN, each process influencing the acquisition of literacy skills in a different way. The efficacy and the specific transfer effects of both interventions open up new perspectives for prevention and targeted remediation of reading disabilities.

Visual information processing skills are associated with academic performance in Grade 2 school children

“…). This may be because RAN is believed to have strong associations with phonological awareness, literacy acquisition and reading difficulties (Vander Stappen & Van Reybroeck ). Indeed, our findings demonstrated that RAN was less strongly associated with PAT‐M results than VMI, but had a similar level of association with PAT‐R results.…”

Longitudinal Relationships Between Reading Abilities, Phonological Awareness, Language Abilities and Executive Functions: Comparison of Low Risk Preterm and Full-Term Children

“…Evidence exists that PA and RAN uniquely contribute to different aspects of reading, and that the combination of deficits in both of them (double deficit hypothesis) produces more pervasive and severe reading impairments than single deficits in either RAN or PA (Wolf and Bowers, 1999;Schatschneider et al, 2002;Kirby et al, 2003;Papadopoulos et al, 2009;Vander Stappen and Reybroeck, 2018). Phonological awareness, lettersound knowledge and alphanumeric RAN were all found to be strong independent predictors of reading development in two longitudinal studies (Caravolas et al, 2013;Clayton et al, 2019).…”

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

“…Intervention studies that attempt to improve rapid naming are scarce and have generated mixed findings. Whereas some studies indicate that training rapid naming has no reliable effect on RAN or reading (Kirby et al, 2010), other studies have found that training RAN can have a positive effect on word-level reading skills (Stappen and Reybroeck, 2018).…”