Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later.

Anne E. Cunningham, Keith E. Stanovich·1997·Developmental Psychology

Abstract

A group of 1st-graders who were administered a battery of reading tasks in a previous study were followed up as 11th graders. Ten years later, they were administered measures of exposure to print, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and general knowledge. First-grade reading ability was a strong predictor of all of the 11th-grade outcomes and remained so even when measures of cognitive ability were partialed out. First-grade reading ability (as well as 3rd- and 5th-grade ability) was reliably linked to exposure to print, as assessed in the 11th grade, even after 11th-grade reading comprehension ability was partialed out, indicating that the rapid acquisition of reading ability might well help develop the lifetime habit of reading, irrespective of the ultimate level of reading comprehension ability that the individual attains. Finally, individual differences in exposure to print were found to predict differences in the growth in reading comprehension ability throughout the elementary grades and thereafter.

Cites (1)

  1. Tracking the unique effects of print exposure in children: Associations with vocabulary, general knowledge, and spelling.
    Cunningham, Anne E., Stanovich, Keith E. · 1991 · Journal of Educational Psychology

Show all 1 references

Cited by (50)

  1. To read or not to read: a meta-analysis of print exposure from infancy to early adulthood
    Mol, Suzanne E., Bus, Adriana G. · 2011 · Psychological Bulletin
  2. A longitudinal investigation of the role of quantity and quality of child-directed speech in vocabulary development.
    Rowe, Meredith L · 2012 · Child Development
  3. Development of emergent literacy and early reading skills in preschool children: Evidence from a latent-variable longitudinal study.
    Lonigan, Christopher J., Burgess, Stephen R., Anthony, Jason L. · 2000 · Developmental Psychology
  4. Untitled work
    1998 · The American Educator
  5. Dimensions of Reading Motivation and Their Relation to Reading Behavior and Competence
    Schiefele, Ulrich, Schaffner, Ellen, Möller, Jens, Wigfield, Allan · 2012 · Reading Research Quarterly

See all 1,606

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0012-1649.33.6.934
The paper
Cunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (1997). Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later. Developmental Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037//0012-1649.33.6.934

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.