Different predictive roles of phonological awareness and visual attention span for early character reading fluency in Chinese.

Previous studies have usually explored the possible mechanisms underlying reading fluency separately from either linguistic (e.g., phonological awareness, PA) or basic cognitive (e.g., visual attention span, VAS) levels, but relatively little is known about the systematic relationship between multiple levels of cognitive factors and reading fluency development. Thus, the present study, from a combinative point of view, investigated the relationship between VAS at a basic cognitive level and PA at a high linguistic level and explored their predictive power for reading fluency development a year later through a longitudinal method. PA and VAS were measured in sixty-five Chinese children who had just entered Grade 1 of primary school (Time 1); PA tests included syllabic and phonemic aspects, and VAS was reflected by performance in the visual 1-back task with nonverbal stimuli and no verbal response. Reading fluency was tested at the single-character level at the beginning of Grade 2 (Time 2). The results showed that phoneme awareness could not predict variation in reading fluency, while both syllable awareness and VAS showed significant predictive powers for single-character reading fluency. Additionally, further analysis revealed that the relationship between VAS and later single-character reading fluency was partially mediated by syllable awareness. These findings indicated Chinese language characteristics in the relationship among VAS, PA, and reading fluency. The possible roles of multiple levels of cognitive skills in fluent reading have been further discussed and have implications for the early diagnosis and remediation of reading dysfluency.