PATTERNS OF READING AND SPELLING IN 10-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN RELATED TO PREREADING PHONOLOGICAL ABILITIES

This paper reports a follow-up study of reading and spelling in a group of 10-year-old children who were first assessed as 4-year-old prereaders. The children's scores on phonological awareness tasks as 4 year olds significantly predicted their reading and spelling ages 6 years later. Qualitative analyses of their reading and spelling processes, conducted within the framework of dual-route models of reading and spelling, indicated that children with good early phonological awareness have well-developed lexical and sublexical reading and spelling procedures. However, they show larger regularity effects in word reading and spelling, are better at nonword reading and spelling, and make more phonologically based errors in both reading and spelling than children with poor early phonological awareness. Furthermore, early phonological awareness scores are significantly related to reading regular but not irregular words. The results are interpreted to suggest that early phonological skills relate more strongly to development of sublexical than lexical processing systems. © 1992.