Developmental Changes in the Cognitive Correlates of Reading Ability and the Developmental Lag Hypothesis

GROUPS OF thirdand fifth-grade children were administered tasks assessing receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, general name-retrieval ability, decoding skill, wordrecognition speed, and the ability to use context to speed word recognition. All of the tasks were significantly related to reading achievement except name retrieval in the third-grade sample. Reading ability in the third-grade children was most strongly related to vocabulary and word-recognition speed, whereas the strongest predictors of reading ability in the fifthgrade sample were vocabulary and decoding skill. The skilled third-grade readers and less skilled fifth-grade readers were approximately matched on overall reading level, providing an opportunity to test a developmental lag model of individual differences in reading skill. The cognitive profiles of these two groups were very similar. Although the traditional domain of developmental lag models has been dyslexia (i.e., severe reading disability), it is argued that this type of model is actually more helpful as an aid to understanding the normal achievement variations observed among nondyslexic children.