Brain and Cognition 55 (2004) 368–373

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Brain and Cognition 55 (2004) 368–373

Predictive influence of phonological processing,morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed

on spelling performanceq

Monique Plazaa,* and Henri Cohenb,*

a Laboratoire Cognition et D�eveloppement, Paris, Franceb Centre de Neurosciences de la Cognition, UQAM, Montreal, Canada

Accepted 12 February 2004

Available online 5 May 2004

Abstract

This paper focuses on the predictive influence of phonological awareness, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming speed on

spelling. The retrospective study correlated spelling performance in a group of 199 French-speaking children at the end of grade 2

with earlier capacities for phonemic manipulation, morphological/syntactic correction, and naming speed, assessed at the end of

grade 1. The results are consistent with an integrative model that challenges the unitary phonological disorder hypothesis and

confirmed that in French, as in other languages, naming speed is an independent predictor of reading performance.

� 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Reading; Spelling; Naming speed; Phonology; Morphological/syntactic skill; Longitudinal study

1. Introduction

An earlier study of a group of 267 children at the end

of grade 1 established that phonological awareness,morphological/syntactic skills, and processes underlying

naming speed strongly correlate with reading and

spelling (Plaza & Cohen, 2003). While phonological

awareness was the most potent factor, naming speed,

and morphological/syntactic skill accounted for a sig-

nificant proportion of variance above and beyond

phonological awareness. Each of the three variables

correlated with written language independently of thecontribution made by the other two.

The principal question addressed in this paper is

whether the contemporaneous correlation observed at

the end of grade 1 would remain significant from grade

1 to grade 2. The course of reading acquisition is

qA longitudinal study from grade 1 to grade 2. This research was

aided in part by a grant from SSHRC.*Corresponding authors.

E-mail addresses: mplaza@psycho.univ-paris5.fr (M. Plaza),

cohen.henri@uqam.ca (H. Cohen).

0278-2626/$ - see front matter � 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2004.02.076

variable, depending on a range of factors such as

cognitive maturity, the family�s social and economic

status, motivational features, and instructional and

teaching methodology (Plaza, Chauvin, Lanthier, &Rigoard, 2002; Plaza & Touzin, 2002). At the end of

grade 2, children have benefited from two years of

reading and spelling instruction. If difficulties observed

at the end of grade 1 persist at the end of grade 2, the

diagnosis of written language disorder is stronger. The

longitudinal dimension allows one to determine whe-

ther correlated variables can be assigned predictive

status.The secondary question was whether in French, as in

English, German, Finnish, Dutch, and Spanish, naming

speed is a predictor of reading and spelling performance,

independent of phonological awareness (Wolf et al.,

2002). Like any other linguistic task, naming speed ev-

idently involves accessing a phonological code. Never-

theless, the processes underlying speed also require

attentional, perceptual, conceptual, memory, lexical,and articulatory processes (Greig Bowers & Newby-

Clark, 2002; Wolf & Greig Bowers, 1999; Wolf & Obr-

egon, 1992, 1997).

M. Plaza, H. Cohen / Brain and Cognition 55 (2004) 368–373 369

To answer these two questions, a group of 254children was given three spelling tasks at the end of

grade 2. The spelling tasks tapped grapheme–phoneme

correspondence rules (pseudo-word dictation), lexical

knowledge (real word dictation), and integrated ortho-

graphic skill (text dictation). Of the 254 children, 76.7%

obtained average scores, 11.8% obtained weak scores

()2 SD) and 11.4% obtained very weak scores. From

this group of children, 199 had been individually testedwith five tasks requiring phonological awareness, mor-

phological/syntactic skill, and naming speed at the end

of grade 1. The study presented here compares the

performance of the three groups of children (average,

weak, and very weak spellers), establishes a correlation

between spelling in grade 2 and phonological, morpho-

logical/syntactic and naming speed skills in grade 1, and

conducts a series of multiple hierarchical regressionanalyses.

2. Method

2.1. Subjects

A group of 254 French-speaking children was givencollective spelling tasks in June 2002 at the end of grade

2; 199 children in the group had been individually as-

sessed at the end of grade 1 in June 2001.

2.2. Procedure at the end of grade 2

The spelling tasks collectively administered at the end

of grade 2 consisted of a pseudo-word spelling task (20items), a word spelling task (20 items), and a text dic-

tation.

(a) The pseudo-word spelling task requires mastery of

an assembly strategy: phoneme–grapheme corre-

spondence rules and sequential processing. The

items involved simple graphemes, contextual gra-

phemes which vary according to the vocalic context

(/g/, /s/, /c/), and complex graphemes (/ouil/, /on/, /ou/, /eu/, /eil/, /in/, /ille/). Subjects� responses were

scored 1 or 0, for correct and incorrect, respectively.

(b) The word spelling task requires mastery of both an

assembly strategy and an addressed lexical strategy.

The items were regular, except for one (femme,

‘‘woman’’) and involved simple, contextual, and

complex graphemes. Subjects� responses were dou-

bly scored, for (1) phonetics (1 point if phoneme/grapheme correspondences were respected) and (2)

usage (1 point if the word was correctly spelled).

(c) The text dictation task requires the assembly strat-

egy, the addressed strategy, and morphological

knowledge: word boundaries, plural, and gender.

Each word received a different score for phonetics,

usage, and grammar.

Five scores were calculated: (1) grapheme–phonemecorrespondence (GPC) in pseudo-words (maximum

score ¼ 20); (2) GPC in isolated words (maximum score

¼ 20); (3) lexical usage in isolated words (maximum

score ¼ 20); (4) global phonetics, involving GPC mas-

tery in all three tasks (maximum score ¼ 72); and (5)

global usage, involving the lexical orthographic use of

words in the real word spelling and text dictation tasks

(maximum score ¼ 44).

2.3. Procedure at the end of grade 1

The tasks administered at the end of grade 1 included

individual assessment of reading, spelling, auditory

verbal memory, oral comprehension, phonological

processing, morphological/syntactic skill, and naming

speed. This paper focuses only on phonological aware-ness, morphology, and naming speed, which were the

variables with the strongest influence.

Phonological awareness was assessed by means of an

initial phoneme deletion task (12 items) (Chevrie-

Muller & Plaza, 2001). The child was asked to delete

the initial phoneme of pseudo-words and to pronounce

the resulting pseudo-words (e.g. /pouk/ without /p/

becomes /ouk/). The list included 6 monosyllabic and 6disyllabic pseudo-words, with 9 vowels and 3 conso-

nants in the initial position. The experimenter gave

two examples. The child had to repeat each item be-

fore giving a response. Subjects� responses were scored

1 or 0.

Morphological/syntactic skill was assessed by means

of a judgment/correction task used in previous studies

(Plaza, 2001; Plaza & Cohen, 2003). The child was askedto listen to 12 sentences and required (a) to decide

whether or not each sentence is grammatical and (b) to

correct any mistakes. Errors in these sentences con-

cerned determiners, subject–verb agreement, gender,

adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and word order.

Subjects� responses were scored 1 or 0. Correct responses

involved (a) correct judgment of grammaticality, and (b)

production of the expected responses (substitution ofone word in 11 sentences, and rearrangement of word

order in one sentence).

Naming speed was assessed using three tasks involv-

ing 48 stimuli (pictures, digits, and letters), derived from

the RAN Test (Denckla & Rudel, 1974).

Task 1: Picture naming. The child was asked to rap-

idly name a visual array of 48 stimuli, consisting of

four pictures (glass, dog, heart, and bed) that are pre-sented 12 times in random order.

Task 2: Digit naming. The child was asked to rapidly

name a visual array of 48 stimuli, consisting of four

digits (7, 2, 1, and 9) that are presented 12 times in

random order.

Task 3: Letter naming. The child was asked to rapidly

name a visual array of 48 stimuli, consisting of four

370 M. Plaza, H. Cohen / Brain and Cognition 55 (2004) 368–373

letters (U, A, C, and B) that are presented 12 times inrandom order.

For each naming speed task, a percentage score was

calculated:

Number of correctly named items

Total time� 100

Inasmuch as strong correlations between the three taskshad been observed in previous studies, a global RAN

score was calculated, including picture, digit and letter

naming.

3. Results

3.1. Children’s spelling skills at the end of grade 2

Table 1 shows that the three groups exhibited sig-

nificantly different performances, both for the assembly

strategy and for the addressed strategy.

The average spellers displayed GPC mastery in 78.5%

of the pseudo-words, in 84% of the isolated words and,

globally, in 83.7% of the words in the three spelling

tasks. On the other hand, they respected lexical ortho-graphic usage in 66.8% of real words.

The weak spellers exhibited GPC mastery in 56.5% of

the pseudo-words, in 59% of the isolated words and,

globally, in 63.8% of the words in all three tasks. They

respected lexical orthographic usage in 34.7% of real

words.

The very weak spellers exhibited GPC mastery in

34.5% of the pseudo-words, in 39% of the isolated wordsand, globally, in 41.1% of the words in the three tasks.

They respected lexical orthographic usage in 21.8% of

real words.

Statistically speaking, the most significant differences

between the three groups concern the GPC mastery as-

sessed in the three spelling tasks (F ¼ 251, p < :0001).

3.2. Early performance at the end of grade 1 on

phonological awareness, naming speed, and morphologi-

cal/syntactic skill

The three groups of children were compared based on

the three tasks they had been given one year before.

Table 1

Spelling skills at the end of grade 2 in the average, weak, and very weak spe

Pseudo-word dictation Word us

Average spellers (N ¼ 159) 15.7 (2.8) 12.8 (3.6

Weak spellers (N ¼ 23) 11.3 (2.6)a 6 (2)b

Very weak spellers (N ¼ 17) 6.9 (4.1)a 3.6 (3.6

a F ð1; 198Þ ¼ 122, p < :0001.b F ð1; 198Þ ¼ 121, p < :0001.c F ð1; 198Þ ¼ 183, p < :0001.d F ð1; 198Þ ¼ 251, p < :0001.e F ð1; 198Þ ¼ 119, p < :0001.

Compared with the average spellers, the weak and veryweak spellers exhibited a significant deficit affecting all

three tasks. They were significantly lower for the pho-

neme deletion task (F ¼ 25, p < :0001), the morpho-

logical/syntactic task (F ¼ 11:8, p < :0001) and the

naming speed tasks (F ¼ 9:2, p < :0001) Table 2.

3.3. Correlation matrix

The purpose of the correlation matrix was to examine

the correlation between individual differences in pho-

nological awareness, morphological/syntactic skill, and

naming speed at the end of grade 1, and spelling per-

formance at the end of grade 2. As shown in Table 3,

GPC mastery significantly correlated with naming speed

(.42, <.0001), morphological/syntactic skill (.43,

p < :0001), and phonological awareness (.61, p < :0001).Lexical orthographic strategy also significantly corre-

lated with naming speed (.39, p < :0001), morphologi-

cal/syntactic skill (.35, p < :0001), and phonological

awareness (.56, p < :0001). The most significant corre-

lation concerned GPC mastery and phonological

awareness.

3.4. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses

To determine whether phonological awareness, mor-

phological/syntactic skill, and naming speed in grade 1

could account for spelling ability in grade 2, several

hierarchical multiple regression analyses were per-

formed; these are shown in Table 4. To determine

whether one variable significantly predicts GPC mastery

and lexical orthographic usage after the other twovariables have been statistically controlled for, each

variable was, respectively, entered at Step 1, Step 2, and

Step 3.

As Table 4 shows, when this was done, the three

variables accounted for a significant independent pro-

portion of variance in GPC mastery and lexical ortho-

graphic skill. It was observed that, when entered at the

last step, phonological awareness accounted for 15% ofvariance for phonological strategy and 14% for ad-

dressed strategy; morphological/syntactic skill ac-

counted for 4% of variance for phonological strategy

llers: mean scores and SDs

age Word phonetics Global phonetics Global usage

) 16.8 (2.3) 60.3 (6) 29.4 (7)

11.8 (2.4)c 46 (4.7)d 15.3 (3.2)e

)b 7.8 (4)c 29.6 (13.9)d 9.6 (6.7)e

Table 4

Hierarchical multiple regression analysis for grade 1 variables predicting phonetic spelling (PHSP) and usage spelling (USP) in grade 2

Step Variable R2 PHSP R2 change PHSP p value R2 USP R2 change USP P value

1 Phoneme deletion .37 <.0001 31 <.0001

2 Morpho-syntax .40 .3 <.002 33 3 <.05

3 Naming speed .46 .6 <.0001 38 7 <.0001

2 Naming speed .43 .6 <.0001 37 6 <.0001

3 Morpho-syntax .47 .4 <.001 38 1 <.04

1 Morpho-syntax .18 <.0001 12 <.0001

2 Phoneme deletion .40 .22 <.0001 33 21 <.0001

3 Naming speed .47 .7 <.0001 38 5 <.0001

2 Naming speed .32 .14 <.0001 24 12 <.0001

3 Phoneme deletion .47 .15 <.0001 38 14 <.0001

1 Naming speed .18 <.0001 15 <.0001

2 Phoneme deletion .44 .16 <.0001 37 22 <.0001

3 Morpho-syntax .47 .3 <.001 38 1 <.04

2 Morpho-syntax .32 .14 <.0001 24 9 <.0001

3 Phoneme deletion .47 .15 <.0001 37 13 <.0001

Table 3

Correlation between performance on the tasks in grade 1 (Gr1) and spelling performance in grade 2 (Gr2)

Variable Global phonetics Gr2 Global usage Gr2 Morpho-syntax Gr1 Phonology Gr1 Naming speed Gr1

Global phonetics Gr2 1 .83 .43 .61 .42

Global usage Gr2 1 .35 .56 .39

Morpho-syntax Gr1 1 .45 .14 ns

Phonology Gr1 1 .29

Naming speed Gr1 1

Note. Correlations greater than .19 are significant at the .05 level, greater than .25 are significant at the .01 level, and correlations greater than .32

are significant at the .001 level.

Table 2

Performances of the three groups of spellers at the end of grade 1 on phonological awareness, naming speed, and morphological/syntactic skill: mean

scores and SDs

Phonological awareness Naming speed Morphological/syntactic task

Average spellers (N ¼ 159) 9.9 (2.5) 37 (7.2) 8.6 (2.1)

Weak spellers (N ¼ 23) 6.7 (4)a 33 (5.8)b 7.1 (2.1)c

Very weak spellers (N ¼ 17) 5.8 (3.7)a 30 (4.9)b 6.3 (2.4)c

a F ð1; 198Þ ¼ 25:9, p < :0001.b F ð1; 198Þ ¼ 9:2, p < :0001.c F ð1; 198Þ ¼ 11:8, p < :0001.

M. Plaza, H. Cohen / Brain and Cognition 55 (2004) 368–373 371

and 1% for addressed strategy; and naming speed ac-

counted for 6% of variance for phonological strategy

and 5% for addressed strategy. Taken as a whole, the

three tasks accounted respectively for 47% of the vari-

ance for phonological strategy and 37% for addressed

strategy.

4. Discussion

The principal aim of the study was to determine

whether the synchronic correlation between written

language, morphology, phonology, and naming speed at

the end of grade 1 demonstrated in our previous study

(Plaza & Cohen, 2002) would remain significant at the

end of grade 2. To answer this question, a group of 254

children was assessed on three spelling tasks at the end

of grade 2. Based on their spelling performances, three

groups of children were constituted: the ‘‘average spell-

ers,’’ ‘‘weak spellers,’’ and ‘‘very weak spellers.’’ Among

the 254 children, 199 had been given tasks requiring

phonology, morphology, and naming speed at the end of

grade 1. The retrospective study explored the links

between these children�s spelling skills at the end of grade2 and their performance profile at the end of grade 1.

With regard to spelling performance in grade 2, the

analysis of variance between the groups revealed that all

three groups of children better mastered the assembly

strategy than the addressed phonological strategy

(pseudo-words versus words; GPC mastery versus lexi-

cal orthographic usage in isolated words and text dic-

tation). These results confirm that, in alphabetic

372 M. Plaza, H. Cohen / Brain and Cognition 55 (2004) 368–373

languages, the orthographic strategy crucially dependson the assembly strategy, which allows the lexicon to

become increasingly redundant and stable (Perfetti,

1997; Share, 1995, 1999).

Nevertheless, it was observed that the discrepancy

between GPC mastery and orthographic lexical strategy

was less marked in average spellers (16.9%) than in weak

and very weak spellers (respectively, 34.1 and 19.3%).

Children who had thoroughly mastered the GPC rules,i.e., the ‘‘phonological route,’’ harmoniously developed

their orthographic lexicon, i.e., the ‘‘addressed route.’’

By contrast, children who experienced difficulties with

GPC rules also suffered from orthographic lexicon re-

striction. The insufficient automaticity of GPC does not

allow an ‘‘amalgamation’’ (Ehri, 1995) between the

phonological, graphic, morphological, semantic, and

orthographic features of the words. The children whodid not use sufficient grapho-phonemic cues to quickly

identify a word when they read it and, a fortiori, when

they spelled it, at the beginning of the learning process

did not create high-quality representations of words in

long-term memory.

The retrospective analysis from grade 2 to grade 1

revealed that, compared with the average spellers, the

weak, and very weak spellers had performed signifi-cantly worse one year before on phonological aware-

ness, naming speed, and morphological/syntactic tasks.

The comparative data were confirmed by the correla-

tion matrix and, overall, by the multiple hierarchical

regression analysis. The importance of GPC mastery

at the earliest stages of written language learning

probably explains why the three variables predicted

47% of variance for the phonetic features of words,and 38% for the orthographic lexical features. Im-

pairment of the phonological route is assumed to

be the best developmental marker of written language

difficulties (Bryant, Nunes, & Bindman, 1998; Morris

et al., 1998).

Among the three factors entered in the regression

equation, phonological awareness appeared as the more

potent predictive variable, which was not surprising.The phoneme deletion task clearly reflects mastery of the

GPC rules and automaticity of the assembly strategy. In

this task, the child was required to encode and hold

phonological information (pseudo-words) in auditory

working memory, access phonemic units, manipulate

them (segmentation, elision, and assembly) and articu-

late a new pseudo-word. Similar processing is required

when a child encodes a written or dictated word in orderto read or spell it.

Naming speed was the second predictive factor for

spelling performance. The tasks that assessed this skill

required the child to encode visual information (pic-

tures, digits, and letters), retrieve lexical labels from

long-term memory (i.e., phonological codes), and ar-

ticulate them. Although naming speed and phonological

awareness tasks share the same emphasis on retrievaland articulation of phonological codes, they differ since

naming speed tasks, like reading activities, require cross-

modal (visual/verbal) processing and automatized re-

trieval speed. The involvement of naming-speed tasks is

in accordance with neuropsychological findings indi-

cating that a slower naming speed may be an index of

lower-level problems disrupting the development of

fluency in word identification (Wolf & Greig Bowers,1999). Reading and writing require efficient, high-speed

connections to be made between visual stimuli (printed

words) and their phonological counterparts (Breznitz,

1997).

Morphological/syntactic skill was the third predictive

factor for spelling performance. The morphological/

syntactic task required the child to encode verbal in-

formation (sentences) in auditory working memory, fo-cus on morphemic units (gender and number markers;

topological and temporal function words), retrieve the

correct item from verbal long-term memory, and artic-

ulate it. The ability to be aware of morphemic features,

which is an indicator of a fine-grained linguistic capac-

ity, is probably also a facilitator during the process of

word identification (Joanisse, Manis, Keating, & Se-

idenberg, 2000). Morphology allows the child to definethe smallest units of meaning and expression, and store

words in the orthographic lexicon on the basis of roots,

derivations and inflections. Some longitudinal studies

have indicated that morphological awareness in spoken

language assessed in kindergarten and first grade is

predictive of reading achievement in second grade

(Carlisle, 1995).

Taken as a whole, the results reported here providesupport for an integrative hypothesis about the inter-

actions between phonological processing, morphologi-

cal/syntactic skill and naming speed as predictors of

reading and spelling (dis)ability.

Our data also answer our secondary question, con-

firming that in French, as in English, German, Finnish,

Dutch, and Spanish, naming speed is indeed a predictor

of reading and spelling performance, independent ofphonological awareness.

Finally, while phonological awareness, morphologi-

cal/syntactic skill, and naming speed represent inde-

pendent sources of difficulties, there are clinical

implications for diagnosis. The data highlight the ne-

cessity of including naming-speed measures and mor-

phological/syntactic skill in dyslexia evaluation, in

addition to phonological measures.

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