Although Arabic is an official language in 27 countries, standardized measures to assess Arabic literacy are scarce. The purpose of this research was to examine the item functioning of an assessment of Arabic orthographic knowledge. Sixty novel items were piloted with 201 third grade Arabic-speaking students. Participants were asked to identify the correctly spelled word from a pair of two words. Although the assessment was designed to be unidimensional, competing models were tested to determine whether item performance was attributable to multidimensionality. No multidimensional structure fit the data significantly better than the unidimensional model. The 60 original items were evaluated through item fit statistics and comparing performance against theoretical expectations. Twenty-eight items were identified as functioning poorly and were iteratively removed from the scale, resulting in a 32-item set. A value of 0.987 was obtained for McDonald’s coefficient ω from this final scale. Participants’ scores on the measure correlated with an external word reading accuracy measure at 0.79 (p < .001), suggesting that the tool may measure skills important to word reading in Arabic. The task is simple to score and can discriminate among children with below-average orthographic knowledge. This work provides a foundation to develop Arabic literacy assessments.

Orthographic knowledge is an important contributor to reading and spelling. However, empirical research is unclear about its long-lasting influence along with literacy development. We examined whether reading and spelling benefitted from an independent contribution of lexical and sublexical orthographic knowledge in European Portuguese, an intermediate depth orthography. This was investigated longitudinally from Grade 2 to 5 with two cohorts of Portuguese children, using common measures of orthographic knowledge, and word and pseudoword reading and spelling tasks. Regression analyses showed that lexical orthographic knowledge assessed at the beginning of Grade 2 predicted word reading at the beginning of Grade 3 (p < .05, variance explained = 6%), word spelling at the end of Grade 2 (p < .05, variance explained = 6%) and pseudoword spelling at the beginning of Grade 3 (p < .05, variance explained = 8%). They also revealed that lexical orthographic knowledge assessed at the beginning of Grade 4 predicted word spelling at the end of Grade 4 (p < .001, variance explained = 21%). Differently, sublexical orthographic knowledge evaluated at the beginning of Grade 2 and of Grade 4 only contributed to pseudoword spelling at the beginning of Grade 3 (p < .01, variance explained = 12%), and to pseudoword reading at the end of Grade 5 (p < .01, variance explained = 9%), respectively. Therefore, orthographic knowledge predicted spelling more often and earlier than reading. Furthermore, the results suggest that the influence of orthographic knowledge may vary during literacy development and, along with findings from other studies, that this influence at the lexical level may depend on orthographic consistency.

Theories of reading development generally agree that, in addition to phonological decoding, some kind of orthographic processing skill underlies the ability to learn to read words. However, there is a lack of clarity as to which aspect(s) of orthographic processing are key in reading development. We test here whether this is orthographic knowledge and/or orthographic learning. Whereas orthographic knowledge has been argued to reflect a child’s existing store of orthographic representations, orthographic learning is concerned with the ability to form these representations. In a longitudinal study of second- and third-grade students, we evaluate the relations between these two aspects of orthographic processing and word-reading outcomes. The results of our analyses show that variance captured by orthographic knowledge overlaps with that of word reading, to the point that they form a single latent word-reading factor. In contrast, orthographic learning is distinctive from this factor. Further, structural equation modeling demonstrates that early orthographic learning was related to gains in word reading skills. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of word-reading development.

A key aspect of the work of many educational and developmental psychologists is the diagnosis of literacy learning disability. One component of this disability is learning to read words automatically. This difficulty is attributed to the gradual development of phonological decoding and the related acquisition of orthographic knowledge. Unfamiliar letter strings can be decoding either overtly, by saying aloud systematically parts of a written word and then blending the parts, or subvocally. Subvocal decoding is assumed to be more mature develapmentally and to be a key acquisition. The present study examines aspects of the acquisition of subvocal decoding by monitoring the reading of pseudowords by average and low achieving third to fifth graders. Subvocal phonological decoding ability was correlated with the accuracy, comprehension, and rate components of prose reading for both categories of reading ability and was higher for the average readers. Its accuracy was influenced by the number of letters in a pseudoword and its sound structure. Low achieving reoders showed a greater sensitivity to subvocal phonological decoding than average reoders. The implications for the diagnosis of reading disabilities by educational and developmental psychologists are discussed.