Early Development and Predictors of Morphological Awareness: Separating the influences of decoding skills from phonological awareness

Abstract

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by persistent reading and spelling difficulties. It has been well established that one of the major causes of these literacy problems lays in a deficit involving the quality and accuracy of phonological representations. Frequently these phonological problems have been linked to more basic perceptual impairments, specifically deficits in temporal auditory processing and speech perception. Yet, debates persist regarding the directionality and role of these relationships within the expressed reading deficits. Longitudinal studies of pre-reading children through literacy development could help to clarify these issues. The current longitudinal study followed 44 pre-reading children with and without a family risk of dyslexia through different stages of reading development. Results show atypical performance in auditory processing of rise time (RT) discrimination and phonological awareness (PA) at three time points (kindergarten, first, and second grade) in children who developed dyslexia. RT and frequency modulation (FM) sensitivity in kindergarten uniquely contributed to growth in reading ability in grades one and two, even after controlling for letter knowledge and phonological awareness. Highly significant concurrent and predictive correlations, even when controlled for autoregressive effects, suggest a potential causal relationship between auditory processing of RT and PA, with kindergarten RT significantly predicting later PA