Early Prediction of Reading Phonological Awareness Early Prediction of Reading Phonological Awareness and Related Language and Cognitive Skills in Children with a Familial Risk for Dyslexia

Puolakanaho, Anne Early Prediction of Reading: Phonological Awareness and Related Language and Cognitive Skills in Children with a Familial Risk for Dyslexia Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2007, 61 p. (Jyväskylä Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research, ISSN 0075-4625; 317 ) ISBN 978-951-39-2998-5 (PDF), 978-951-39-2957-2 (nid.) Yhteenveto: Lukemistaitojen varhainen ennustaminen – Fonologinen tietoisuus, kielelliset ja kognitiiviset taidot lapsilla joiden suvussa esiintyy dysleksiaa Diss. This thesis explored the developmental connections from early phonological awareness and related language and cognitive skills to 2nd grade reading accuracy, fluency and specific reading disability, in the context of Finnish: a language with high orthographic regularity. The four studies presented addressed the following three main themes: emerging phonological awareness and its relationship to reading-related language and cognitive skills, links from these childhood skills to 2nd grade outcomes, and early prediction of an individual child’s risk for dyslexia. The results are based on behavioural-level tasks and longitudinal assessment of nearly 200 children belonging to the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. The findings indicated that emerging phonological awareness skills can already be measured at the age of 3.5 years using age-appropriate and language-modified tasks. In addition, phonological skills are predicted by prior verbal comprehension, language production and cognitive skills. Phonological awareness and related language and cognitive skills (e.g., pseudoword repetition, expressive vocabulary, verbal short term memory and rapid serial naming of objects) at the age of 3.5, 4.5 and 5.5 years were found to form a broader constellation of strongly interrelated and developmentally stable skills than has been previously suggested. In accordance with the phonological core hypothesis it was also shown that in the orthographically regular Finnish language, reading accuracy was relatively strongly predicted by early phonological and language abilities but considerably weaker links were found to reading fluency. A rough index for an individual child’s risk for reading disability could be constructed using three key risk measures. An attempt is made to construct a conceptual framework of the paths leading to reading acquisition. A challenge for future studies lies in the investigation of the unique paths leading to fluent reading and in developing methods and programs for training fast and efficient decoding.