The Relation among Phonological Processing, Oral and Silent Reading Fluency, and Reading Comprehension for Students with Dyslexia: A Longitudinal Investigation

The purpose of this study was to examine the relations among phonological skills, reading fluency, and reading comprehension across reading modality (oral and silent) for a sample of students (N = 121) in grades 2-5 who have been diagnosed with dyslexia. Participants were administered text-level oral and silent reading fluency and comprehension assessments and selected phonological processing measures at the beginning and end of the school year. Cross-lagged path analyses were used to examine the relations among the phonological processing and reading skills across two theoretical models, one depicting reading fluency as a single construct and another representing rate and accuracy separately. Across models, results indicated that oral reading contributed to silent reading development but that this relation was not reciprocal. RAN emerged as a robust contributor to all aspects of oral and silent reading examined in this study, whereas phonological awareness contributed to fluency across modalities but did not impact end-of-year comprehension. Results generally followed a pattern of progression from lower to higher reading skills and from oral to silent reading. Further, important trends with regard to the contribution of phonological awareness to fluency subskills (rate and accuracy) were obscured when fluency was considered as a single construct, suggesting that it may be important for researchers to consider these subskills separately.