Longitudinal Stability of Reading-Related Skills and Their Prediction of Reading Development

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension for 324 children at a mean age of 16 were predicted from their reading-related skills (phoneme awareness, phonological decoding, rapid naming, and IQ) at a mean age of 10 years, after controlling the predictors for the autoregressive effects of the correlated reading skills. There were significant and longitudinally stable individual differences for all four reading-related skills that were independent from each of the reading and spelling skills. Yet the only significant longitudinal prediction of reading skills was from IQ at mean age 10 for reading comprehension at mean age 16. The extremely high longitudinal latent-trait stability correlations for individual differences in word recognition (.98) and spelling (.95) left little independent outcome variance that could be predicted by the reading-related skills. We discuss the practical and theoretical importance of these results and why they differ from studies of younger children.