Cognitive and linguistic predictors of literacy skills in the Greek

The aim of this thesis was three-fold: firstly, to examine the development of reading and spelling abilities in the Greek language; secondly, to identify the cognitive predictors of reading and spelling skills; and finally, to establish how developmental dyslexia is manifested in the regular Greek orthography. An extensive battery of cognitive, linguistic, and literacy tasks was administered to 132 children: 66 Grade-2 and 66 Grade-4 Greek-speaking children attending four different schools in Athens, Greece. The battery included: tests of reading, spelling, and mathematical attainment a nonword reading task, various phonological awareness & other phonological processing tests; a non-verbal intelligence test and various syntactic awareness tasks. Evidence on the manifestation of developmental dyslexia in Greek was based on a chronological-age and a reading-level matchedpairs comparison between poor and average readers. Despite a large number of difficult polysyllabic word stimuli, reading accuracy was at ceiling for most subjects. Reading speed proved a more effective measure of individual differences. A high degree of accuracy was also observed on many phonological awareness tests. Rapid naming, phonological awareness and speech rate proved the most important predictors of reading ability in the regular Greek language. The predictive value of many variables/tests, however, appeared to differ between English and Greek. Phonological awareness the most powerful and stable predictor in English appeared to be a reliable predictor of reading ability only at the initial stages of literacy development (Grade-2). The most significant