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Abstract: This study examined the role of motivational or attitudinal factors, such as achievement beliefs and behaviours, in learning to read before receiving formal instruction. A total of 200 Finnish children were examined at ages 5 and 6½. Half of them (n =107) had a familial risk for dyslexia. The results showed that those children who were verbally skilful at age 5 showed a higher level of task-focused behaviour at age 6½. This task-focused behaviour then contributed to spontaneous reading acquisition. The impact of previous verbal skills on spontaneous reading acquisition was mediated in part by achievement behaviour. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper addresses the question whether the cognitive underpinnings of reading and spelling are universal or language/orthography-specific. We analyzed concurrent predictions of phonological processing (awareness and memory) and rapid automatized naming (RAN) for literacy development in a large European sample of 1062 typically developing elementary school children beyond Grade 2 acquiring five different alphabetic orthographies with varying degrees of grapheme–phoneme consistency (English, French, German, Hungarian, Finnish). Findings indicate that (1) phonological processing and RAN both account for significant amounts of unique variance in literacy attainment in all five orthographies. Associations of predictors with reading speed, reading accuracy, and spelling are differential: in general, RAN is the best predictor of reading speed while phonological processing accounts for higher amounts of unique variance in reading accuracy and spelling; (2) the predictive patterns are largely comparable across orthographies, but they tend to be stronger in English than in all other orthographies. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]