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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.
Human beings are supposed to possess an approximate number system (ANS) dedicated to extracting and representing approximate numerical magnitude information as well as an object tracking system (OTS) for the rapid and accurate enumeration of small sets. It is assumed that the OTS and the ANS independently contribute to the acquisition of more elaborate numerical concepts. Chinese children have been shown to exhibit more elaborate numerical concepts than their non-Chinese peers, but it is still an open question whether similar cross-national differences exist with regard to the underlying systems, namely the ANS and the OTS. In the present study, we investigated this question by comparing Chinese and German preschool children with regard to their performance in a non-symbolic numerical magnitude comparison task (assessing the ANS) and in an enumeration task (assessing the OTS). In addition, we compared children’s counting skills. To ensure that possible between-group differences could not be explained by differences in more general performance factors, we also assessed children’s reasoning ability and processing speed. Chinese children showed a better counting performance and a more accurate performance in the non-symbolic numerical magnitude comparison task. These differences in performance could not be ascribed to differences in reasoning abilities and processing speed. In contrast, Chinese and German children did not differ significantly in the enumeration of small sets. The superior counting performance of Chinese children was thus found to be reflected in the ANS but not in the OTS.