Does Rapid Automatized Naming Explain Unique or Common Variance in Children’s Reading and Mathematical Trajectories?

• In Event: Talking About Numbers

Abstract

Background
Children’s reading and mathematics skills are predictive of their socioeconomic status in adulthood (Ritchie & Bates, 2013). Although the nature and learning of mathematics differ from those of reading, there are substantial underlying relations between the two domains (Davis et al., 2014). Moreover, the co-occurrence of learning difficulties across the two domains is common (Mazzocco & Grimm, 2013), and such comorbidity is more often associated with severe impairment in academic and social functioning than difficulty in a single domain (Willcutt et al., 2013). To facilitate identification of and interventions for children with comorbid learning difficulties, it is vital that early common precursors associated with learning are identified across reading and mathematics. Phonological skills, such as phonological awareness and phonological memory, have been found to contribute to reading and mathematics skills in typically developing children (Simmons & Singleton, 2008) and to differentiation between children with comorbid difficulties in the two domains and those with difficulty in one domain (Cirino et al., 2015). Another understudied, and more controversial, precursor of reading and mathematical skills is rapid automatized naming (RAN), as assessed by a simple task in which children name sequentially presented symbols (pictured objects, color patches, letters, or digits) as quickly as possible. Recently, there is emerging evidence showing that RAN, as compared to phonological skills, has an equally strong relation or an even stronger one to reading and mathematics skills (Koponen, Salmi, Eklund, & Aro, 2013; Koponen et al., 2016; van der Sluis, de Jong, & van der Leij, 2004; Willburger, Fusseneger, Moll, Wood, & Landerl, 2008).
Aims
This study examined whether RAN predicts unique or common variance in children’s reading and mathematics trajectories. We hypothesize that RAN is associated with both common and unique variance in reading and mathematics trajectories.
Methods
Participants were 378 Finnish children (182 girls; age at kindergarten entry: M = 74.0 ± 3.4 months) who were randomly selected from a larger longitudinal sample of 1,880 children.
Measures of RAN with pictured objects as stimuli (Ahonen, Tuovinen, & Leppäsaari, 1999), of reading skills with a reading fluency task (Lindeman, 1998), and of mathematics skills with a procedural computation task (Aunola & Räsänen, 2007) were administered longitudinally six times between kindergarten and fourth grade. Covariate variables including the child’s age, sex, parental education, linguistic, spatial, and numerical skills were measured in kindergarten.
Parallel growth-curve analyses were performed to examine the relation of RAN to common and unique variances in children’s reading and mathematics growth trajectories after controlling for demographic and cognitive covariates.
Results
After controlling for the covariates, RAN significantly explained 18.9% of common variance in reading and mathematics growth trajectories and 7.2% of unique variance in mathematics trajectories and did not significantly explain the unique variance in reading trajectories.
Conclusions
The findings highlight the potential role of RAN in explaining the covariance between reading and mathematics skills and the co-occurrence of learning difficulties across the two domains. RAN also may play a unique role in explaining children’s mathematics learning.

Authors

• Xiao Zhang, The University of Hong Kong
  Presenting Author

• Tuire Koponen, Jyväskylä University

• Pekka Räsänen

• Kaisa Aunola, University of Jyväskylä

• Marja-Kristiina Lerkkanen, Jyväskylä University