Developmental changes in the relations between RAN, phonological awareness, and reading in Spanish children

We examined the developmental relations of phonological awareness (PA) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) with reading in a cross-sectional study with 874 Spanish children from Grades 2 to 6. Our main prediction was that the RAN-reading relationship would decrease due to a gradual change in reading strategy, from serial decoding to sight word reading. Therefore, in contrast to most previous studies, we used discrete reading tasks. Serial RAN tasks for objects, colors, digits, and letters were included. First, we examined whether the RAN tasks loaded on the same constructs across time. An alphanumeric and a nonalphanumeric factor were identified, which were invariant over time. In subsequent multigroup structural equation models we found that the PA-reading relationship was low but slightly increased in the higher grades. As predicted, the RAN-reading relationship decreased for words, whereas the relationship remained stable for pseudowords.