Predictors of word reading skills in good and struggling readers in Sinhala

Abstract

We examine the association between phoneme awareness, phonological memory and RAN and word reading as a function of early reading skill (struggling vs. good) and word characteristics (presence of consonant clusters and word length). Sixty Grade 3 good readers and 60 struggling readers learning to read Sinhala completed the phonological, RAN and word reading tasks. Struggling readers performed poorer than good readers in all tasks and had only mastered reading of short words with no consonant clusters. Both groups had difficulties in reading longer words and words with consonant clusters. RAN, phoneme awareness and phonological memory were robustly associated with word reading. We discuss the need for further studies to fully understand the role of phonological processes and word characteristics in learning to read alphasyllabaries.

Keywords:

• Alphasyllabary
• Reading development
• Phonological processing

Notes

¹ PE had a floor effect (14 scored zero) in the struggling reader group and ceiling effect (22 scored 12) in the good reader group. Four groups were formed by keeping zeros as is (n = 14), rescoring one to nine (n = 37) as 1, 10 and 11 (n = 45) as 2 and 12 (n = 24) as 3.

² One SRG participant had missing RAN-Numbers score and these analyses included 59 SRG participants.

³ PE analyses were also repeated with the original scores and the results were identical.