Phonological processes as predictors of specific reading skills in children at risk for reading failure

Children at risk for reading disability were evaluated as kindergartners and again as first graders to determine (1) intercorrelations among phonological processing tasks and (2) the relationship of such tasks to word identification and word attack. With IQ controlled, there were no intercorrelations among measures of phonological awareness, phonetic recoding in working memory, and phonological recoding in lexical access. Thus, these results failed to substantiate the concept of a general phonological processing ability. Partial correlations controlling for IQ revealed no relationship between reading and phonological awareness or phonetic recoding in working memory. In contrast, lexical access measures were significantly, albeit moderately, correlated with word identification but not word attack. Word attack and word identification were predicted by different combinations of variables. These results suggest that lexical access ability is an important factor in reading acquisition and that different combinations of phonological processes may be related to different aspects of reading.

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