Presented at the 27th International School Psychology Association Colloquium. Athens, 13–17 July 2005

Rapid recognition of printed words is an essential component of reading and is considered as a prerequisite for text comprehension. The purpose of the present study was to identify the potential contribution of various reading and language skills to the development of reading speed, accuracy, and automaticity. Children in grades 2–4 (representing a random sample of 400 students in 21 Greek schools) were tested on measures of phonological decoding, expressive and receptive vocabulary, rapid automatized naming, reading speed and accuracy, and text comprehension. A series of latent variable models were implemented to examine relations between measures, aiming to determine the importance of the different component processes for predicting reading comprehension in the three grades. Of particular interest were developmental trends expressed as variation in relative importance of different predictors as a function of time. Variables such as student's placement and gender were examined as mediators of the relationship between starting ability and the growth parameter. The results highlight the prominent role of rapid word recognition for the development of text comprehension skills in a shallow orthographic system.