Dynamic associations between phonological processing skills, visual perception, and early reading and numeracy skills: A network analysis

This longitudinal study employed behavioral network analysis to examine (a) the dynamic interplay between phonological processing skills (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming [RAN], and phonological memory), visual perception, and early reading and numeracy skills, (b) the relative importance of these cognitive skills in early reading and numeracy skills, and (c) how the strength of the connections between these processing skills and reading/numeracy skills changes over the course a year. We followed 250 second-year Chinese kindergartners (49% female; M age = 4.65 years, SD = 0.70) for a year and measured their phonological awareness, RAN, phonological memory, visual perception, reading and numeracy skills at three time points, each separated by approximately six months. Results showed that among the phonological processing skills, phonological awareness consistently emerged as the node with the highest expected influence and bridge expected influence, and its association with both reading and numeracy skills remained strong over time. In contrast, the contributions of phonological memory to reading and of RAN to numeracy weakened over the course of this study. For visual perception, its connection with children’s reading remained stable over time, but strengthened from the second to the third measurement time for numeracy. This study is among the first to use a network analytic approach to demonstrate the central role of phonological awareness and visual perception in early literacy and numeracy skills, and to provide evidence for emerging domain-specific specialization in the cognitive foundations of early academic skills.