Pre-School Prediction and Prevention of Dyslexia: A Longitudinal Study with Children of Dyslexic Parents

Transition to literacy

“…These languages have clear often one-on-one letter-speech sound correspondences and regular spelling rules such as Finnish being the most transparent European language and Italian and Dutch that are considered fairly transparent. The few at-risk studies that identified early cognitive readingrelated markers such as PA, RAN and LS processing as relevant kindergarten predictors were mainly conducted in opaque orthographies Petersen & Elbro, 1999;, although a few at-risk studies also researched children learning to read in a transparent orthography Puolakanaho et al, 2008;. Learning to read in an opaque or deep orthography, like English or Danish, with not just one-on-one but numerous possible letterspeech sound mappings, is much more effortful and time-consuming than learning to read in a relative transparent orthography .…”

“…The predictive role of PA however disappeared once IQ and general language ability were controlled for (for similar results in children with poor reading-related kindergarten skills but without a family history of dyslexia see . Elbro et al ( , 1999 showed that kindergarten PA, next to LK and RAN, contributed to the variance in grade 1 and 2 reading of a Danish-speaking at-risk sample, although they also pointed out that these predictive results should be interpreted with caution since one third of children received an intensive PA kindergarten training. Snowling et al (2003) reported that kindergarten PA and a compound letter-sound score (letter knowledge, non-word reading and phonetic spelling) were significant predictors of subsequent reading in a combined group of English-speaking at-risk and no-risk children.…”