Predicting reading achievement in a transparent orthography: Russian children learn to read

Abstract

This study investigated the cognitive, linguistic, and reading skills of 79 Russian-speaking first and second graders to determine the strongest concurrent predictors of reading achievement. The children were administered a battery of 15 tests from which nine objective, interval-scale measures were derived: phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, decoding accuracy, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, nonverbal ability (IQ), vocabulary, decoding rate, and rapid naming. In a series of multiple regression analyses, phonological awareness accounted for a small amount of unique variance in both decoding accuracy and decoding rate whereas rapid naming was a unique predictor of decoding rate only. Neither verbal short-term memory nor IQ accounted for any variance in decoding. For reading comprehension, IQ and linguistic comprehension contributed a substantial amount of variance to the prediction of achievement whereas decoding rate did not. However, in a series of direct discriminant function analyses, reliable differences emerged between good and poor decoders on reading comprehension, indicating that decoding <italic> is