Word Reading and Writing in Preschool Children at Risk for Literacy or Speech-Language-Literacy Difficulties: Considering Meaning Accessibility and Within-Syllable Position

Objectives: Reading and writing are essential academic skills that begin to develop in preschool. Children with speech and language difficulties experience greater challenges in reading and writing. This study examined differences in word reading and writing performance among children with literacy difficulties only and those with speech-language-literacy difficulties, by considering meaning accessibility and within-syllable position. Methods: Participants were five-year-old children, divided into three groups: Children with typical development (TD), children at risk for literacy difficulties (LD), and children at risk for speech-language-literacy difficulties (SLLD), with 20 children in each group. Each child was asked to read and write seven words and seven nonwords with consistent phonemegrapheme correspondences. Responses were scored in grapheme units, and a three-way mixed ANOVA was used to analyze the effects of group, meaning accessibility, and withinsyllable position on word reading and writing. Results: The LD and SLLD groups showed significantly lower accuracy than the TD group in nonword reading, with the SLLD performing the lowest on word reading. In word writing, both at-risk groups showed consistently low accuracy across all syllable positions, regardless of meaning accessibility. The TD group also showed lower accuracy in writing the final grapheme, with a performance gap depending on meaning accessibility. Conclusion: Word reading and writing performance varied by group, meaning accessibility, and within-syllable position. At-risk children already showed substantial gaps before school entry. Particularly, language weaknesses of the SLLD group hindered word reading, showing how speech and language difficulties impact early literacy. These findings highlight the importance of assessing at-risk children’s reading and writing performance in preschool, considering both meaning accessibility and within-syllable position.