Vocabulary, phonological awareness and rapid naming: contributions for spelling and written production.

PURPOSE To investigate if the performance on linguistic tasks would be predictive of orthographic domain and quality of written productions. METHODS Participants were 82 fourth graders of Elementary Education, from public and private schools of São Paulo, with ages ranging from 9 years to 10 years and 2 months. The test battery was composed of an expressive vocabulary test, phonological awareness and rapid serial naming tasks, words and pseudowords spelling, and written text composition using a visual stimulus as a starting point. The statistical analysis included Spearman (r) correlations among all tasks. RESULTS The results indicated that the better the vocabulary skills, the smaller the number of spelling errors and the better the quality of the written text productions, considering all the analyzed categories. Also, the higher performance in both phonological awareness and rapid object naming tasks was correlated to fewer spelling errors and written text productions with greater grammatical structure. CONCLUSION The linguistic abilities analyzed in this study were predictive of subjects' spelling performance. The vocabulary skills were predictive of the quality of written text productions. However, phonological awareness and rapid serial naming were only predictive of children's performance concerning the syntactic and grammatical structure of their written text productions.