The longitudinal relationship between early inhibitory control skills and emergent literacy in preschool children

This study analyses the longitudinal relationship between early inhibitory control skills and subsequent emergent literacy. At Time 1, a sample of 50 typically monolingual Italian toddlers aged 28 to 36 months in their last year of day-care was assessed on expressive vocabulary and two inhibitory control measures, tapping specifically response inhibition and interference suppression. At Time 2, during the preschool years, children aged 49 to 72 months were re-assessed on a battery of emergent literacy tasks including three phonological awareness tasks and an orthographic knowledge task. The results of the hierarchical linear regression analyses suggest that interference suppression evaluated at Time 1 is a key process in the acquisition and construction of both phonological awareness and early orthographic knowledge, even when children’s early expressive vocabulary was included in the analyses. Unlike previous studies, the present study included very young children, thus allowing us to explore the developmental antecedents of two important precursors of reading and writing abilities.