The Prediction of Syllable Awareness, Character Reading Ability, and Rapid Automatized Naming on Phoneme Awareness: Evidence from a Longitudinal Cross-Lag Model

Phonological awareness is a crucial factor for the development of reading ability. Yet, a comprehensive understanding of the impact factors of phonological awareness in early age is still a challenge. The current study investigated the contributions of character reading ability (CR), and rapid automatized naming (RAN) to early phonological awareness (including phoneme awareness (PA) and syllable awareness (SA)) skill developmental trajectories in kindergarten children. A total of 127 young Chinese children were tracked two times. The dynamic phoneme deletion task, syllable deletion task, character reading task, and rapid object naming task were used to measure PA, SA, CR, and RAN, respectively. Cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) was used to examine the longitudinal and bidirectional relationship among these four reading skills. Results showed that performance improved on all four reading skills across the two points for children. Both of CR and RAN had low to moderate correlations with phonological awareness at both time points. Model results were as follows: 1) after controlling for child age, sex, and SES, there were significant positive autoregressive paths for PA, CR, and RAN; 2) SA, CR, and RAN at T1 significantly predicated PA at T2, but PA at T1 did not predict other reading-related skills at T2. 3) CR at T1 could positively predict SA at T2. Conclusion: CR, and RAN at earlier time were important impact factors of the development of phonological awareness, and larger phonological awareness units (syllable) not only precede but also impact the development of small units (phoneme).