Phonological awareness and RAN contribute to Chinese reading and arithmetic for different reasons

The present study investigated how phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming (hereafter, RAN), simultaneously contributed to Chinese reading and arithmetic fluency. Specifically, we proposed a new hypothesized mechanism that processing speed would mediate the relations of RAN with Chinese reading and arithmetic fluency. One hundred and forty-five Chinese children at the fifth grade were administered with a battery of measures, including three phonological processing measures, character reading, and whole number computation, as well as nonverbal IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. Path analyses revealed that phonological awareness and RAN were uniquely related to character reading and arithmetic fluency, while phonological memory was not significantly correlated to either character reading or arithmetic fluency, after controlling for age, nonverbal IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. Further analysis indicated that processing speed demonstrated a mediating effect on the importance of RAN in character reading, rather than in arithmetic fluency. Results underscore the potential importance of phonological awareness and RAN in character reading and arithmetic fluency, and the mediating role of processing speed in RAN to promote Chinese character reading fluency.