The study investigates the relationship between rapid serial naming and phoneme awareness, and reading and spelling ability. Participants were 146 North-American children and adolescents varying in age from seven to 18 years. Approximately half of the participants (N = 71) had reading difficulties. The results suggest that rapid serial naming contributes variation to reading and spelling ability that is independent of the contribution of phoneme awareness. However, relative to this skill, rapid serial naming makes a rather modest contribution to learning to read and spell in an alphabetic writing system. Further analyses suggested that rapid serial naming is particularly important for the development of the ability to read texts rapidly and accurately, whereas phoneme awareness is particularly important for the development of the ability to read by phonological recoding, that is, by translating letters or group of letters into their phonological codes. Finally, there was little indication that the role played by either phoneme awareness or rapid serial naming interacts with age or reading ability
Rapid serial naming; phoneme awareness; reading and spelling
