Passive and Active Components of Working Memory and Transcription Skills among First-Graders

Transcription skills allow us to put spoken language into written text, and they entail handwriting processes and spelling knowledge. Handwriting and spelling are supported by different processes, but they are highly related. Additionally, both are directly supported by working memory (WM). The present study aims to examine how differently passive and active components of WM affect transcription (handwriting and spelling) among Italian beginner writers. We evaluated 395 Italian first-grade children (197 boys and 198 girls) with an average age of 6 years and 6 months (SD = 4.3 months) with five writing tasks (three handwriting tasks and two spelling tasks) and two WM tasks (passive components = span task; active components = selective span task). We computed a SEM analysis to investigate how differently the passive and active WM components affect the two spelling tasks both directly and via handwriting. Passive and active WM components directly affect handwriting; while spelling is directly affected by the active WM, and indirectly (via handwriting) by both WM components. These results confirmed the crucial role of handwriting in predicting spelling accuracy. In conclusion, current results show that the distinction between passive and active WM components is useful to understand how WM supports transcription processes.