Which Factors Modulate Letter Position Coding in Pre-literate Children?

One of the central landmarks of learning to read is the emergence of orthographic processing (i.e., the encoding of letter identity and letter order): it constitutes the necessary link between the low-level stages of visual processing and the higher-level processing of words. Regarding the processing of letter position, many experiments have shown worse performance in various tasks for the transposed-letter pair judge-JUDGE than for the orthographic control jupte-JUDGE. Importantly, 4-y.o. pre-literate children also show letter transposition effects in a same-different task: TZ-ZT is more error-prone than TZ-PH. Here, we examined whether this effect with pre-literate children is related to the cognitive and linguistic skills required to learn to read. Specifically, we examined the relation of the transposed-letter in a same-different task with the scores of these children in phonological, alphabetic and metalinguistic awareness, linguistic skills, and basic cognitive processes. To that end, we used a standardized battery to assess the abilities related with early reading acquisition. Results showed that the size of the transposed-letter effect in pre-literate children was strongly associated with the sub-test on basic cognitive processes (i.e., memory and perception) but not with the other sub-tests. Importantly, identifying children who may need a pre-literacy intervention is crucial to minimize eventual reading difficulties. We discuss how this marker can be used as a tool to anticipate reading difficulties in beginning readers.