There is now a large body of evidence assessing predictors of literacy development in a range of orthographies contrasted for orthographic consistency. Across languages, this literature highlights the essential role of metalinguistic awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid naming in entering literacy. In their review chapter, Caravolas and Samara (2015) have described these three skills as the Triple Foundation of early literacy, as illustrated in Figure 4-2. According to the Triple Foundation Model, awareness of metalinguistic units (phonemes, syllables, rimes and morphemes) and symbol knowledge (letters, syllabographs, morphographs and word spellings) are involved in initial sound-to-symbol mappings, whilst rapid naming is considered an indicator of the ability to quickly and accurately retrieve these mappings for reading and spelling words. This model, however, focuses on the early stages of literacy development, relies more heavily on reading than spelling data, and considers exclusively single word reading and spelling.
Figure 4-2: The Triple Foundation Model of early literacy proposed by Caravolas and Samara (2015).
To our knowledge, the only comprehensive assessment of spelling predictors in late primary school across languages is provided by the Neurodys European consortium (Moll et al., 2014). In as many as five languages, including English and French, Moll et al. (2014) assessed the Rapid Automatic Naming (RAN, digits and pictures), phoneme deletion skills (as an index of phonemic awareness), and digit span (as an index of phonological short-term memory) of 1062 typically-developing children, along with their word reading accuracy and speed, and word spelling accuracy. Children were between their third and seventh year of formal education at the time of testing. In English, RAN was significantly related to spelling (r = .43), as well as phonological awareness (r = .40) and phonological memory (r = .30). By contrast, in French RAN was not significantly related to word spelling, and only phonological memory (r = .30) and phonological awareness were (r = .21). In all other languages, phonological awareness was the most important correlate of spelling (r = [.37-.50]). Regressions confirmed the importance of RAN in English, with r² = 16.7% unique contribution to word spelling performance, whilst phonological memory stood out as the most important regressor in
French (r² = 6.6%). Results of the regression analyses were commensurate with those of the correlations. Altogether, RAN, phonological memory and phonological awareness accounted for a total of r² = 34.7% variance in spelling scores in English and r² = 8.9% in French. In all other languages, the model fit varied between r² = 9.3% and r² = 16.2%. However, when the impact of language on the regression models was assessed using multilevel modelling, no significant language effect appeared. These results raise two issues. One relates to the importance of RAN for spelling in English. Consistent with other studies (Stainthorp, Powell, & Stuart, 2013), RAN was a significant predictor of word spelling in English. This has been previously interpreted as a proxy of the depth of the English orthography, leading children to rely heavily on retrieval processes in specifying and accessing accurate orthographic representations (Savage, Pillay, & Melidona, 2008). The second comment relates to the relative importance of phonological memory in the French model, and the relatively poor fit of this model overall. The importance of phonological memory in French spelling suggests complex processes may be at play when French children attempt to spell words: processes putting a load on their phonological memory, and apparently not captured by a phoneme manipulation task.
One very recent study sheds further light on processes involved in spelling in these two languages. Desrochers, Manolitsis, Gaudreau, and Georgiou (2018) assessed Canadian French, Canadian English, and Greek students at the beginning of year 2 on RAN, phonological awareness and morphological awareness. Their spelling, reading accuracy, reading speed and reading comprehension was then assessed at the end of year 2. In English, phonological awareness (r = .61), morphological awareness (r = .51) and RAN (r = -.48) were significantly correlated to spelling scores. In French, a similar pattern was observed, with correlations of
r = .53 with phonological awareness, r = .50 with morphological awareness, and r = -.19 with
RAN. Structural equation modelling was further used to predict the weight of early year 2 measures with the literacy outcomes at the end of the school year. The model with three
predictors accounted for r² = 45% of variance in English, and r² = 32% of variance in French. Morphological awareness predicted a unique 1.4% of variance in English, and 6% in French, the most important contribution in all three languages. When models were compared across languages, however, no difference appeared in the relative weight of each predictor between the French and English sample. Consistent with previous studies conducted in French and English in children aged 8 and above (Casalis, Deacon, & Pacton, 2011; Deacon, Kirby, & Casselman-Bell, 2009), morphological awareness was an important predictor of spelling performance as early as the end of the second year of primary school. Importantly, both inflectional and derivational morphology were assessed in this study, and multiple tasks were also used to assess phonological awareness (phoneme elision in words and non-words) and RAN (colour and digit naming). The spelling task, from the WIAT-II, comprised regular and irregular words, as well as derived and inflected forms, capturing a variety of spelling processes. Figure 4-3 presents the results of the structural equation model conducted for English, French and Greek by Desrochers et al. (2018), and shows the relations of the RAN, phonological awareness and morphological awareness composites to literacy measures at the end of year 2. These recent findings provide a firm rationale for including morphological awareness, alongside phonological and RAN, as a predictor of spelling in late primary school in future models.
Figure 4-3: Model of relationships between RAN, phonological awareness, morphological awareness and literacy measures, as assessed by Desrochers et al. (2018) in English, French and Greek at the end of year 2.