TY - JOUR A1 - Ehm, Jan-Henning A1 - Lonnemann, Jan A1 - Brandenburg, Janin A1 - Huschka, Sina Simone A1 - Hasselhorn, Marcus A1 - Lervag, Arne T1 - Exploring factors underlying children’s acquisition and retrieval of sound sound-symbol association skills JF - Journal of experimental child psychology N2 - Letter knowledge is considered an important cognitive foundation for learning to read. The underlying mechanisms of the association between letter knowledge and reading skills are, however, not fully understood. Acquiring letter knowledge depends on the ability to learn and retrieve sound–symbol pairings. In the current study, this process was explored by setting preschool children’s (N = 242, mean age = 5.57 years) performance in the acquisition and retrieval of a paired associate learning (PAL) task in relation to their letter knowledge as well as to their performance in tasks assessing precursors of reading skills (i.e., phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, phonological short-term memory, backward recall, and response inhibition). Multiple regression analyses revealed that performance in the acquisition of the PAL task was significantly associated with phonological awareness and backward recall, whereas performance in the retrieval of the PAL task was significantly associated with rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, and backward recall. Moreover, PAL proved to be mediating the relation between reading precursors and letter knowledge. Together, these findings indicate that the acquisition of letter knowledge may depend on a visual–verbal associative learning mechanism and that different factors contribute to the acquisition and retrieval of such visual–verbal associations. KW - Visual-verbal associative learning KW - Phonological awareness KW - Letter knowledge KW - Rapid automatized naming KW - Working memory KW - Reading Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.07.006 SN - 0022-0965 SN - 1096-0457 VL - 177 SP - 86 EP - 99 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER -