Cognitive flexibility predicts early reading skills.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Efficient reading requires accessing orthographic, phonological, and semantic information.
• Cognitive flexibility may be essential for coordinating this linguistic information during reading acquisition.
• Previous research linked flexibility to reading comprehension, primarily in English, suggesting an orthography-dependent effect.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the link between cognitive flexibility and early reading skills (word reading, comprehension).
• To determine if this link involves domain-general or reading-specific flexibility.
• To examine if the relationship is orthography-dependent, testing in French.

Main Methods:

• 60 second-graders learning to read French participated.
• Two multiple classification tasks assessed reading-specific and non-specific cognitive flexibility.
• Reading skills were measured using word reading, pseudo-word decoding, and passage comprehension.

Main Results:

• Cognitive flexibility significantly predicted passage reading comprehension in French.
• Flexibility was critical for reading words in isolation, a core component of comprehension.
• The findings suggest flexibility's role in reading is not solely dependent on complex orthographies.

Conclusions:

• Cognitive flexibility contributes to reading comprehension even in transparent orthographies.
• Flexibility is vital for word reading, a foundational aspect of reading acquisition.
• The study provides evidence that cognitive flexibility is important for reading, irrespective of whether it is domain-general or reading-specific.