| Rapid automatized naming test (RAN) is a measure of continuous naming speed designed by Denckla (1972) and developed by Denckla and Rudel (1974), which discriminates between good readers and poor readers. RAN contains four task paradigms:picture, color, number, and letter naming. The subject is asked to name aloud pictures, colors, letters or numbers as quickly as they can, and the naming time is taken as the test score. Many studies abroad consistently revealed that the reading achievements of dyslexics were highly correlated with naming speed. Dyslexics had naming speed deficit, which showed from kindergarten, and this deficit may remain salient during adolescence and even adulthood. Domestic studies also found that rapid naming deficit was one of the cognitive deficits in Chinese developmental dyslexic children. (Ho & Lai,1999; Zhou & Meng,2001; Ho et al.,2002,2004; Liu, Liu & Zhang,2004; Huang et al.,2007,2008; Zheng, Huang & Jing,2007; Sui, Wang & Ma,2008). Rapid naming deficit refers that the naming speed of familiar visual signs is at or more than one standard deviation slower than the mean of the same age on a regular basis (Meng, Sha, & Zhou,2004).Most domestic studies used RAN in school-age children and limited researches referred to preschoolers. The present thesis presents a tentative study of the application of RAN to Chinese children aged 3-6 to add data to related researches. The present study intends to test the development of naming speed -which is a basic cognitive skill related to reading- of preschoolers via naming times and to see whether there exist age differences and gender differences. The present study also tries to screen out children who may have rapid naming deficit and thus are at risk of developmental dyslexia by the definition of rapid naming deficit. RAN in the present study contains 3 subtasks, picture, color, and number respectively. Rapid picture naming contains 4 stimuli (dog, hand, apple, and chair) presented 10 times in random in a 5 row * 8 column grid on the A4 paper. Rapid color naming contains 4 stimuli (red, yellow, green, and black) too, and has the same arrange as the rapid picture naming. Rapid number naming contains 5 numbers (2,4,6,7,9) presented 10 times in random in a 5 row * 10 column grid on the A4 paper. Based on previous studies, some researchers thought the incidence rate of developmental dyslexia in China was probably between 4.5% and 8%(Zhao & Fang,2004). The present study will screen out children who may have rapid naming deficit and thus are at risk of dyslexia from the subjects who can fulfill all the three naming tasks, and then to see whether the percentage they account for in the range mentioned above. If the percentage we get is within this range, RAN could be considered as one possible candidate of the screening tools which assess children's early language and reading development.The results show that the development of naming speed of preschoolers increases with the increases of ages. Age differences exist significantly and there's no significant gender difference. There are totally 140 subjects who can fulfill all the three tasks, and from them, the author screens out 7 children who may have rapid naming deficit and thus are at risk of dyslexia, which accounts for 5% that is in the range Zhao and Fang (2004) mentioned above. This result, though uncertain, does show the effectiveness of RAN as one possible screening tool. The male-female ratio of these 7 children is 6:1, which shows boys are prone to dyslexia. Three age norms for three naming tasks based on these 140 subjects are presented. The author expects parents and teachers to pay more attention to the early identification and intervention of those children at risk for reading failure to decrease their possibilities of becoming dyslexics in the future.
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