Estudio sobre conciencia fonológica

Developmental Links of Very Early Phonological and Language Skills to Second Grade Reading Outcomes
Strong to Accuracy but Only Minor to Fluency
Anne Puolakanaho Timo Ahonen Mikko Aro Kenneth Eklund Paavo H. T. Leppänen Anna-Maija Poikkeus Asko Tolvanen Minna Torppa Heikki Lyytinen
University of Jyväskylä

Journal of Learning Disabilities Volume 41 Number 4 July/August 2008 353-370 © 2008Hammill Institute on Disabilities 10.1177/0022219407311747 http://journaloflearningdisabilities .sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

The authors examined second grade reading accuracy and fluency and their associations via letter knowledge to phonological and language predictors assessed at 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 years in children in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. Structuralequation modeling showed that a developmentally highly stable factor (early phonological and language processing [EPLP]) behind key dyslexia predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, vocabulary, and pseudoword repetition) could already be identified at 3.5 years. EPLP was significantly associated with reading and spelling accuracy and by age with letter knowledge.However, EPLP had only a minor link with reading fluency, which was additionally explained by early letter knowledge. The results show that reading accuracy is well predicted by early phonological and language skills. Variation in fluent reading skills is not well explained by early skills, suggesting factors other than phonological core skills. Future research is suggested to explore the factorsbehind the development of fast and accurate decoding skills. Keywords: longitudinal study with SEM analyses; very early phonological and language predictors of dyslexia; reading accuracy and fluency

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tudies conducted in orthographically regular languages, such as Italian, Greek, and Finnish, have shown that in such language environments, children learning to read can shift the emphasisfrom decoding accuracy toward decoding fluency (involving accuracy and rate and the use of prosodic features and text phrasing; e.g., Kuhn & Stahl, 2003; Torgesen, Rashotte, & Alexander, 2001) during the 1st or 2nd school year. In contrast, in more irregular languages such as Danish and English, children’s emphasis remains on the accuracy phase of reading, with the eventual shift taking place muchlater. Although several studies have indicated that preschool phonological, language, and prereading skills predict reading accuracy well, it remains unknown

whether these skills are also the best predictors of reading fluency (Aro, 2006; Goswami, 2002; Seymour, 2005; Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003; Wimmer & Mayringer, 2002). In a highly regular language such as Finnish,
Authors’ Note: Theauthors are grateful to all the families, children, and teachers for their long-lasting cooperation with the JLD project. They would like to offer special thanks to the whole inspirational research team of JLD and the Niilo Mäki Institute. The authors also wish to thank Professor Rauno Parrila for his comments on this paper. The Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD) belonged to the FinnishCenter of Excellence Program (2000-2005) and was supported by the Academy of Finland. This research was also supported by the Department of Psychology, Jyväskylä. Please address correspondence to Anne Puolakanaho, P.O. BOX 35 (Agora), FIN-40351,University of Jyväskylä,Finland; email: anne.puolakanaho@psyka.jyu.fi.

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children are at an interestingpoint in development by the end of second grade. This is because there is still variation in accuracy, whereas fluency can already be measured in a psychometrically valid manner. Recent longitudinal studies (Carroll & Snowling, 2004; Catts, Fey, Zhang, & Tomblin, 2001; de Jong & van der Leij, 2003; Elbro, Bostrom, & Petersen, 1998; Lyytinen, Aro, et al., 2004; Lyytinen, Eklund, et al., 2004;...