The predictive power of phonemic awareness and naming speed for early Dutch word recognition

Abstract

Effects of phonemic awareness and naming speed on the speed and accuracy of Dutch children’s word recognition were investigated in a longitudinal study. Both the speed and accuracy of word recognition at the end of Grade 2 were predicted by naming speed from both kindergarten and Grade 1, after control for autoregressive relations, kindergarten letter knowledge, and kindergarten vocabulary knowledge. Phonemic awareness in kindergarten predicted the accuracy of word recognition at the end of Grade 2. The effects of naming speed and phonemic awareness on word recognition were found to be quite independent.

Keywords:

• early literacy
• reading research
• longitudinal
• phonologic awareness
• naming speed