Rapid Naming and Reading

Almost three decades of research had demonstrated that the vast majority of children and adults with reading disabilities have pronounced difficulties when asked to name rapidly the most familiar visual symbols and stimuli in the language: letters, numbers, colors, and simple objects. The Rapid Automatized Naming Test (RAN), the most popular naming speed test, requires the testee to name 50 items on each of four charts (Colors, Objects, Numbers, Letters) consisting of five different stimuli repeated 10 times at random in a 10 x 5 matrix.

Initially, deficits in rapid naming were viewed as part of the phonological deficit in poor readers. However, researchers have found that this is not the case. For example, when the irregularity of English orthography as a possible explanatory factor in the naming-speed findings is eliminated, the speed-of-processing variable emerges as a stronger predictor of reading performance than phonological awareness tasks. In German and Dutch — two languages with a more transparent or regular orthography than English — naming speed appears a more robust predictor of reading performance than phonological awareness measures.

At most, phonological processes represent only one subset of the multiple processes involved in naming. Visual naming represents a demanding array of other skills including attentional, perceptual, conceptual, memory, and lexical processes; clearly, the most demanding being visual sequential processing.