Narrative writing, reading and cognitive processes in middle childhood: What are the links?

This study investigated the relationship between measures of reading and writing, and explored whether cognitive measures known to be related to reading ability were also associated with writing performance in middle childhood. Sixty-Four children, aged between 8 years 9 months and 11 years 9 months, took part in a battery of writing, reading, and cognitive ability tasks. Reading fluency emerged as having a strong relationship to written language performance, after controlling for age and verbal reasoning. While children with reading difficulties were weak at spelling accuracy, they were otherwise found to produce written compositions of similar quality to typical readers. Boys produced less written text than girls, but did not demonstrate weaker written language abilities. Collectively the results demonstrate that writing skills can be separated into transcription and composition processes, and highlight the need for further research on the relationship between reading fluency and children's writing.

► We studied reading, narrative writing, and cognitive skills in children.
► Reading fluency was strongly related to several writing transcription measures.
► Poor readers differed significantly only on transcription measures in writing.
► Males produced less text than females but were similar in higher writing skills.
► Our findings support a distinction between transcription and higher level writing.