This longitudinal study examined the relationship between kindergarten word writing and
grade 1 literacy in a large sample of Israeli children. In kindergarten, a majority of children
produced writing which displayed most of the graphospatial characteristics of conventional word
writing, although only one-third of the children demonstrated a working knowledge of the
alphabetic principle. Kindergarten writing significantly predicted variance in all three measures
of grade 1 literacy (decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension), even after controlling for
general intelligence. We also investigated the role of alphabetic skills and socioliteracy variables
in accounting for the predictive power of kindergarten writing. Kindergarten alphabetic skills
(phonemic awareness and knowledge of letter names), but not socioliteracy factors (parental print
exposure, parents' reading to child, and Clay's Concepts about Print), explained all
the variance contributed by kindergarten writing to grade 1 decoding and spelling. In the case of
reading comprehension, both alphabetic and socioliteracy variables were able to account for the
predictive power of kindergarten writing. As a precursor of reading comprehension, kindergarten
writing appears to reflect both domain-specific alphabetic skills and broader socioliteracy factors
underlying the higher order cognitive competencies essential for comprehending text.
Distinctive Role of Symbolic Number Sense in Mediating the Mathematical Abilities of Children with Autism
