Predictive and discriminant value of naming speed in Spanish: an experience with Argentine children

The early detection of readers with difficulty is fundamental for the implementation of remediation programs. In Latin America there are few tools to assess pre-literacy skills. Naming speed and phonological awareness are considered the main predictors of reading. The aim of this work was to adapt the RAN/RAS (Rapid Automatized Naming/Rapid Alternating Stimulus) test published by Wolf and Denkla (2005) to Spanish and to determine the correlation of the naming measures with reading between preschool and 3rd grade of Primary School. For this purpose, 142 children of ages between 5 and 8 years were evaluated in rapid naming tasks, phonemic awareness, phonemic segmentation, letter, word, and pseudo word reading, and comprehension of texts according to the school year. The results obtained show that the naming speed is a good predictor of reading and correlates with measures of fluency and accuracy. These results confirm that establishing normative data in the Latin American population would be very useful for the early detection of children at risk.