| This study investigated the cognitive, linguistic, and reading skills of 79 Russian-speaking first and second graders to determine the strongest concurrent predictors of reading achievement. The children were administered a battery of 15 tests from which nine objective, interval-scale measures were derived: phonological awareness, verbal short-term memory, decoding accuracy, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, nonverbal ability (IQ), vocabulary, decoding rate, and rapid naming. In a series of multiple regression analyses, phonological awareness accounted for a small amount of unique variance in both decoding accuracy and decoding rate whereas rapid naming was a unique predictor of decoding rate only. Neither verbal short-term memory nor IQ accounted for any variance in decoding. For reading comprehension, IQ and linguistic comprehension contributed a substantial amount of variance to the prediction of achievement whereas decoding rate did not. However, in a series of direct discriminant function analyses, reliable differences emerged between good and poor decoders on reading comprehension, indicating that decoding is relevant to reading comprehension in young Russian readers. The good and poor readers also differed reliably on phonological awareness, vocabulary, IQ, and listening comprehension. Taken together, the findings indicate that the cognitive operations that drive the development of reading in the Russian language share many similarities with those in other languages including English. However, they also indicate some important characteristics of Russian reading that make it distinct from reading in other languages. These characteristics concern the relative weight of cognitive abilities in determining reading achievement, the manifestations of reading disability, and the reading strategies that Russian children appear to adopt for word recognition and may reflect the effect of the largely transparent Russian orthography. These findings converge with those obtained in other languages and suggest that reading in all alphabetic languages may be characterized by universal as well as language-specific aspects. This study also investigated the structure of phonological awareness in the Russian language, revealing, through Rasch analysis, that this ability is best conceptualized as a unidimensional ability that can be measured by a variety of tasks. |
