Latent Profile Analysis of At-risk Preschool Readers Focusing on Phonological, Orthographic, and Morpho-Semantic Abilities

Objectives: This study aimed to classify and examine the characteristics of at-risk preschool readers, focusing on their phonological, orthographic, and morpho-semantic abilities.Methods: Seventy preschool children aged 5-6 years participated in this study. All children had no cognitive difficulties but had reading difficulties compared to their peers. Phonological, orthographic, and morpho-semantic abilities were assessed using three tasks for each ability: phonological awareness (PA), phonemic memory (PM), and percentage of correct consonants (PCC) for phonological ability; letter knowledge (LK), word writing (WW), and nonword writing (NW) for orthographic ability; receptive vocabulary (RV), expressive vocabulary (EV), and morphological structure (MS) for morpho-semantic ability. A latent profile analysis (LPA) was conducted using the three abilities, and differences between the latent groups classified through the LPA were examined. Results: Four latent groups were identified based on phonological, orthographic, and morpho-semantic abilities. The results showed that the first group had the lowest performance, while the second group had the highest performance across all three abilities. The third group had strengths in orthographic ability, whereas the fourth group had weaknesses in orthographic ability. Conclusion: The at-risk preschool readers was classified into ‘group with difficulties in all three abilities,’ ‘group with weaknesses in PA’, ‘group with weaknesses in PA and morpho-semantic abilities’, and ‘group with weaknesses in PA and LK.’ Although they share difficulties in reading, they may have different characteristics in phonological, orthographic, and morpho-semantic abilities. Therefore, individualized support based on a comprehensive reading assessment is needed to improve their reading abilities.