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The cognitive bases of learning to read and spell in Greek: evidence from a longitudinal study.

Nikolopoulos D, Goulandris N, Hulme C, Snowling MJ

Department of Psychology, University of Crete, Rethymno 74100, Greece.

We conducted a longitudinal study examining the role of phonemic awareness, phonological processing, and grammatical skills in the development of reading and spelling abilities in Greek. A battery of cognitive, linguistic, and literacy tasks was administered to 131 primary school children (65 7-year-olds and 66 9-year-olds) and was repeated in the following year (8- and 10-year-olds, respectively). Phoneme awareness, speech rate, and rapid automatized naming (RAN) were concurrent predictors of reading rate at Time 1 (T1), and speech rate was a longitudinal predictor of reading rate at Time 2 (T2) when reading at T1 was controlled. The predictors of spelling differed from those of reading; phoneme awareness and speech rate predicted concurrent attainments at T1, and phoneme awareness was a robust longitudinal predictor. Despite the differences in the degree of transparency between the Greek and English orthographies, phoneme awareness predicts variations in learning to read and spell in both languages.

Published 17 April 2006 in J Exp Child Psychol, 94(1): 1-17.
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