Why is rapid naming speed related to reading? Examining different theoretical accounts

This thesis consists of three separate papers. The first paper examined: (a) how rapid automatized naming (RAN) speed components---articulation time and pause time---predict reading accuracy and reading fluency in grades 2 and 3; and (b) how RAN components are related to measures of phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and speed of processing. Forty-eight children were administered RAN tasks in grades 1, 2, and 3. Results indicated that pause time was highly correlated with both reading accuracy and reading fluency measures and shared more of its predictive variance with orthographic knowledge than with phonological awareness or speed of processing. In contrast, articulation time was only weakly correlated with the reading measures and was rather independent of any processing skill at any point of measurement.;The third paper reports on a cross-linguistic longitudinal study that examined the predictors of word decoding and reading fluency in children learning to read an orthographically inconsistent language (English) and children learning to read an orthographically consistent language (Greek). One-hundred-ten English-speaking Canadian children and 70 Greek-speaking Cypriot children attending grade 1 were examined on measures of RAN, phonological awareness, phonological memory, orthographic knowledge, word decoding, and reading fluency. The same children were reassessed on word decoding and reading fluency measures when they were in grade 2. Results indicated that both phonological and orthographic processing measures contributed uniquely to reading ability in grades 1 and 2. However, the importance of these predictors was different in the two languages particularly with respect to their effect on word decoding.;The second paper examined how RAN is related to reading ability across languages that vary in orthographic consistency. Forty English-speaking Canadian children, 40 Greek-speaking Cypriot children, and 40 Chinese-speaking Taiwanese children were administered RAN, reading accuracy, and reading fluency tasks in grade 4. The results revealed that across languages there were no statistically significant differences in the correlations between RAN and reading. However, a subsequent analysis of the RAN components---articulation and pause time---revealed that different RAN components may be responsible for the RAN-reading relationship across languages. The article concludes with implications for existing theories relating RAN to reading.