Over a decade of research has shown that three kinds of phonological processing skills--phonological awareness, phonological recoding in lexical access, and phonetic coding in working memory--are related to the normal acquisition of reading skills, and are suspected sources of reading disabilities. We have two objectives in this project. First, we intend to identify the number and kinds of latent abilities that underlie performance on tasks that purport to be measures of phonological awareness, phonological recoding in lexical access, and phonetic recoding in working memory. Second, we intend to identify the nature of causal relations between developing latent phonological abilities and the acquisition of reading and spelling skills. Specifically, we seek to determine (a) which aspects of phonological processing (e.g., awareness, use in lexical access, use in working memory) are causally related to which aspects of reading (e.g., word recognition, word analysis, reading comprehension) and spelling, and (b) the direction and possible origins of these causal relations. Five experiments will be carried out over a five-year period that represent three convergent approaches to reaching our objectives. In Experiment 1, we carry out a large-scale evaluation of a phonological skills battery for our population of interest (kindergarten through grade 3). In Experiment 2, we use a longitudinal-correlational study (300 kindergarten children will be followed for 3 years) to test alternative models of causal relations between the development of phonological abilities and the acquisition of reading and spelling skills. In Experiment 3, we use a large-scale training study (120 children will receive intensive training for 7 months) to provide a second, convergent approach to understanding the nature of phonological abilities and their causal relations with the acquisition of reading and spelling skills, In Experiments 4 and 5, we use experimental analysis of the processing requirements of selected phonological tasks to provide a third, convergent approach to these same questions.
