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Automaticity as an independent trait in predicting reading outcomes in middle-school
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Automaticity as an independent trait in predicting reading outcomes in middle-school

Tanja C Roembke, Eliot Hazeltine, Deborah K Reed and Bob McMurray
Developmental psychology, Vol.57(3), pp.361-375
03/2021
DOI: 10.1037/dev0001153
PMCID: PMC8559868
PMID: 33570987

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Abstract

Many middle-school students struggle with basic reading skills. One reason for this might be a lack of automaticity in word-level lexical processes. To investigate this, we used a novel backward masking paradigm, in which a written word is either covered with a mask or not. Participants (N = 444 [after exclusions]; nfemale = 264, nmale = 180) were average to struggling middle-school students from an urban area in Eastern Iowa that were all native speakers of English and were roughly equally from grades 6, 7, and 8 (average age: 13 years). Two-hundred-fifty-five students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for economic disadvantage. Participants completed different masked and unmasked task versions where they read a word and selected a response (e.g., a pictured referent). This was related to standardized measures of decoding, fluency, and reading comprehension. Decoding was uniquely predicted by knowledge (unmasked performance), whereas fluency was uniquely predicted by automaticity (masked performance). Automaticity was stable across two testing points. Thus, automaticity should be considered an individually reliable marker/reading trait that uniquely predicts some skills in average to struggling middle-school students. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

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