Rapid Automatized Naming, (RAN, a measure of the ability to name aloud objects, colours, digits or letters) and phonological awareness are two reading-related measures that are shown to predict early reading ability strongly and reliably (e.g., Moll et al., 2014; Caravolas et al., 2019). However, the relevance and predictive power of each individual measure is still under debate. This study focuses the influence of RAN on early reading ability, problematizing to what extent RAN contributes to assessments aiming to predict reading ability. The main aim, however, is to problematize how this knowledge is best to put into practice. Thus, when is RAN relevant to use as an indicator of reading ability and when are other indicators more relevant?

Because of the efforts being made to identify children, at an early stage, who are at risk of reading difficulties children are in school screened for their reading ability. But screening children is both time-consuming and costly, and therefore it must be well thought out what is being screened for, how to interpret results, but also how are the results to be used and implemented in the school's operations? Thus, given that children's time in school is limited, any activity that focuses on reading achievement must in one way or another be based on knowledge established to improve reading. Hence, the time it takes to screen children needs to be balanced against the time it takes from teaching.

In previous research, RAN is claimed to be a measure of phonological processing time and reflects how fast representations can be retrieved from long-term memory (Bowey et al., 2005; Torgesen, et al., 1997). Further it has been debated whether RAN and phonological awareness each contribute unique information to early reading, or if the measures will be merely two ways of measuring one ability, phonological processing. For example, Chiappe et al. (2002) found that most of the variance contributed by RAN to reading ability is shared with phonological awareness. Further, and in line with the understanding of RAN and phonological awareness being two sides of the same coin, it is claimed by Ziegler et al. (2010) that RAN will only become the dominant predictor when phonological awareness tasks are not challenging enough.

However, another view is that RAN and phonological awareness are two distinct measures predicting early reading ability (Torppa et al., 2013). In a cross-sectional study de Groot et al., (2015) compared reading disabled children with more skilled readers and found that for the reading disabled children the combination of RAN and phonological awareness showed the highest predictive values. When comparing the effects of phonological awareness and RAN on reading ability phonological awareness appears to be the best predictor of reading disability whilst RAN is indicated to be the best predictor of above-average to excellent reading ability (de Groot et al., 2015).  

Other longitudinal studies show that the predictive power of RAN and phonological awareness on reading appears to change by age (e.g. Kirby at al., 2003; Vaessen & Blomert, 2010) and hypothesized by some researchers to be connected to the reading strategy used (Vaessen & Blomert, 2010; Rodriguez et al., 2015). Reading development is assumed to shift from a slow sequential phonological decoding to an automatic orthographic processing (Ehri, 2005).

In order to investigate the relevance of RAN in reading assessment, the present study measured RAN repeatedly among a group of children who were followed from kindergarten through their time in elementary school.

Method In this longitudinal study 364 children were recruited from 45 preschools in 8 different municipalities. The children were followed between ages 4 and 15. RAN was measured by three different stimuli, objects, digits and letters. RAN-objects was measured between ages 4 and 15. RAN-letters and RAN-digits were measured between ages 8 and 15. Word reading and reading fluency was examined. Word reading was measured between ages 8 and 15 by two different tests. The word chain test, where three words are printed without inter-word spaces. The task is to mark the correct inter-word spacing with a vertical line. The test is performed on time. The second test was a Word reading list. The task is to read aloud as many printed real words as possible within 60 s. Words were presented in vertical lists and were not graded by difficulty. The test used was specially developed for this study. Number of correctly read words after 30 seconds was recorded. Reading fluency was measured at two times, when children were 8 years old and when they were 10 years old. At both times the child reads a narrative text aloud consisting of words with varying complexity regarding for example clusters and phoneme/grapheme correspondence. Rate was recorded The main analytic method used in this study are regression analyses. RAN performance will be regressed on reading ability at different ages and differentiated by level of performance. Both word reading and reading fluency will be taken into account.

Results In the current study the preliminary results suggest that when children still are learning to read RAN predicts both word reading and reading fluency. For children slow at RAN this appears to apply even when they get older. However, for children high performing on RAN it appears as if RAN becomes more relevant when children are older, even if it appears to be significant from the beginning. Thus, in line with previous research, the preliminary results suggests that the predictive power of RAN on reading achievement change as children get older. Further, it can be assumed that children´s reading development is important when interpreting the results, which might also apply to the reading measure used. The relevance of RAN in reading assessments will be discussed.

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