Associations between early pre-reading and phonological skills in the light of auditory word recognition and lexical ability

The association between pre-reading skills and phonological production skills has been shown at school age, but less is known about how these skills interact at an earlier age when they are just developing. The focus was to investigate whether a connection between pre-reading skills (letter naming, rapid automatised naming; RAN) and phonological production skills of children at 3;6 could be found. In addition, the possible effects of the following skills were considered in the analysis: auditory word recognition and lexical ability at 3;6; and early expressive lexicon size at 2;0, adding a longitudinal aspect to the study. The participants were Finnish-speaking children (n = 66). The results show a significant connection between letter naming skills and phonological measures (paradigmatic and phonotactic skills) at 3;6, whereas no association was found between RAN and phonological production skills. Phonological production skills were significantly correlated with all the variables: pre-reading, lexical and auditory word recognition. The pre-reading measure correlated only with phonological production skills and lexical ability that was measured concurrently at 3;6. The findings propose a central role for the phonological production skill in terms of pre-reading skills, auditory word recognition and previous and concurrent lexical ability.