Bourke, L. 1 , Davies, S. 1 , Sumner, E. 2 & Green, C. 1
1 Department of Psychology, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK
2 Department of Psychology, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
The present study investigated the relative contribution of working memory to the acquisition of emergent writing skills at letter, word and sentence level in typically developing children aged 4-5 years. There are bi-directional processing advantages to reading and writing and the two literacy domains are taught in parallel. Of particular interest was the role of visual short-term and working memory in the interplay between reading and writing development. It is essential that the orthographic configuration of the correct grapheme correspondence to represent the speech based code is identified. Therefore, it was predicted at the earliest stages of formal instruction that there would be a greater reliance on visual short-term and working memory to support the visual discrimination skills required to encode this information from reading in order to perform writing tasks. To test this hypothesis the children were assessed on the visual and phonological domain specific storage and processing components of working memory. Measures of nonverbal cognitive ability, orthographic awareness and the children’s ability to write letters, words and sentences, independently, were examined. The findings are discussed in relation to current theoretical conceptualisations of the cognitive underpinnings related to individual differences in the developmental efficacy of early writing skills.