What early skills predict reading in kids at risk of dyslexia?
Children's broad spoken-language skills at age 3-4 predicted how well they later learned letter sounds and phonemes, how well they read words, and how well they understood text years later.
Source
The Foundations of Literacy Development in Children at Familial Risk of Dyslexia
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cohort — Prospective longitudinal study with roughly yearly assessments from age 3-4 (Time 1) to 7-9 (Time 5); two-group structural equation model comparing at-risk and typically developing children.
- N
- N=245 · 245 children recruited at Time 1 (71 typically developing, 86 family risk only, 36 language impaired only, 37 family risk plus language impairment, 15 referred but not meeting criteria); 15 more joined at Time 2. Attrition was small.
- Population
- English-speaking children in York, UK, at familial risk of dyslexia and/or with preschool language impairment, plus typically developing controls
- Outcome
- Preschool language and speech; letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and rapid naming at school entry; word reading and spelling after about a year of school; reading comprehension at about 8½ years
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Researchers in York followed 245 children from age 3-4 to about 8, assessing them roughly once a year. Many had a parent with dyslexia, a preschool language impairment, or both; the rest were typically developing. Early tests covered vocabulary, grammar, articulation and word/nonword repetition; later tests covered letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness, rapid naming, word reading, spelling and reading comprehension, analysed with structural equation modelling.
What they found
At-risk children scored lower than controls on all language and literacy measures. Broad language at Time 1 predicted letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and rapid naming at school entry, whereas speech skills independent of language did not. Letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness (but not rapid naming) predicted word reading a year into school, and reading comprehension at about 8½ was predicted by both word reading and early language. The model explained 60% of variance in word reading and 34% in comprehension for at-risk children, and the same pattern held in both groups.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is correlational longitudinal data, so it cannot by itself prove that improving early language would improve reading; the authors lean on separate intervention studies for the causal claim. The sample came from one UK city and the sample size was set by what was practical to recruit. Family-risk and language-impaired children were combined into one at-risk group, and one assessment wave was not reported. Rapid naming did not predict early word reading here, possibly because its influence emerges later.
Key terms
- Familial risk of dyslexia
- Having a close relative, usually a parent, with dyslexia, which raises a child's chance of reading difficulties.
- Phoneme awareness
- The ability to notice and manipulate individual speech sounds in words, such as saying the first sound of a nonword.
- Grapheme-phoneme knowledge
- Knowing which letters or letter groups correspond to which speech sounds.
- Rapid automatized naming (RAN)
- How quickly a child can name a grid of familiar items such as colours or objects; a known predictor of reading fluency.
- Simple view of reading
- The theory that reading comprehension depends on both decoding printed words and understanding spoken language.
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Quiz yourself
Which early factor predicted later preliteracy skills?
Common questions
Is dyslexia just a problem with speech sounds?
This study suggests broader language skills like vocabulary and grammar matter too, feeding into phoneme awareness, letter learning and later comprehension.
Why combine family-risk and language-impaired children?
Their performance levels and the relationships between measures were very similar, so the authors treated them as one at-risk group.
What does this imply for early education?
The authors argue early years teaching should build broad oral language, not only phonics and sound awareness.
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