Role of phonological skills in predicting word reading outcomes in reading fluency period

The relationship between phonological awareness (PA), naming speed (RAN), phonological working memory (PWM) and reading has been well researched in many languages. In the lengthy process of learning to read fluently relationships between different cognitive mechanisms and reading change and are often dependent on factors of age, reading instruction, characteristics of orthography, etc. Achieving reading fluency is important for students since fluent reading is prerequisite for freeing up cognitive resources used for decoding in early reading. Fluent reading is defined by automatic word recognition i.e. fast and accurate decoding which is correlated with one of the most important literacy skills - reading comprehension (Rasinski, Rikli & Johnston, 2009). Crosslinguistic research shows that in transparent orthographies children reach high degrees of decoding accuracy very early on (Landerl & Wimmer, 2008), yet reading difficulties become more prominent when curriculum outcomes switch from accurate decoding to reading comprehension which is dependent on automatic word recognition. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of phonological skills (PSs) in predicting word reading accuracy (WRA), speed (WRS) and fluency (WRF) for typical readers (TRs) and readers with dyslexia (RDs). Research questions were as follows: 1) Is there a difference between TRs and RDs in PSs and word reading outcomes? 2) Are PSs (PA, PWM and RAN) significant predictors of WRA, WRS and WRF at the fluent reading period? The study sample consisted of 46 TRs (M_age=9;05) and 21 RDs (M_age=10;05). All participants were attending the 3^rd and 4^th grade, spoke Croatian as their first language, and had no sensory or motor impairments. Preliminary results show that there is statistically significant difference between TRs and RDs on all PSs and word reading measures. Linear regression analysis shows that PSs are significant predictor of word reading speed (R²=0.42, F (6, 39)=4.615, p<0.001), word reading accuracy (R²=0.31, F (6, 39)=2.943, p<0.05) and word reading fluency (R²=0.46, F (6, 39)=5.552, p<0.001). The role of underlying cognitive mechanisms such as PA, PWM and RAN for each reading outcome will be further discussed as well as theoretical and educational implications of the results.