The Role of Paired Associate Learning in Acquiring Letter-Sound Correspondences: A Longitudinal Study of Children at Family Risk for Dyslexia

Visual-verbal-paired associate learning (PAL) is strongly related to reading acquisition, possibly indexing a distinct cross-modal mechanism for learning letter-sound associations. We measured linguistic abilities (nonword repetition, vocabulary size) longitudinally at 3.5 and 4.0 years, and visual-verbal PAL and letter knowledge at 4.0 and 4.5 years, in pre-reading children either at family risk for dyslexia (N = 27) or not (N = 25). Only...