Cognitive antecedents of early reading ability: A test of the modularity hypothesis

This study tested the hypothesis that the cognitive antecedents of word recognition are uniquely domain-specific and unrelated to higher-order domain-general cognitive abilities. This hypothesis was evaluated in a longitudinal study of 349 Hebrew-speaking children (mean age: 6.0 years) who were test...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of experimental child psychology 2003-09, Vol.86 (1), p.1-31
Main Authors: Shatil, Evelyn, Share, David L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child Development
Child, Preschool
Cognition
Cognitive Ability
Cognitive Development
Comprehension
Developmental psychology
Emergent Literacy
Female
Foreign Countries
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Hebrew
Humans
Intelligence
Israel
Language
Language Skills
Longitudinal Studies
Male
Memory
Modularity
Phonological Processing
Prediction
Predictor Variables
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reading
Reading Ability
Reading Comprehension
Recognition (Psychology)
Specificity
Word Recognition
Young Children
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Summary:This study tested the hypothesis that the cognitive antecedents of word recognition are uniquely domain-specific and unrelated to higher-order domain-general cognitive abilities. This hypothesis was evaluated in a longitudinal study of 349 Hebrew-speaking children (mean age: 6.0 years) who were tested on a battery of domain-specific (phonological awareness, phonological memory, visual-orthographic processing, and early literacy) and domain-general tasks (general intelligence, higher-order reasoning, and language) at the end of kindergarten. Word recognition and reading comprehension were assessed at the end of Grade 1. Whereas the kindergarten domain-specific measures accounted for significant and substantial variance in word recognition (33%), the domain-general measures explained only 5% of the variance. Furthermore, the contribution of domain-specific variables to word recognition remained unaltered even after controlling for all domain-general and higher-order language tasks. Reading comprehension, in contrast, was predicted by both print-specific skills (51%) and domain-general abilities (44%). These findings strongly support the notion of word recognition modularity in a well-encapsulated orthography.
ISSN:0022-0965
1096-0457
DOI:10.1016/S0022-0965(03)00106-1