Because reading is assumed to utilize the same languaging and conceptual base as is used in auding, we expect that, in general, persons who score high on measures of languaging by auding will also score high on measures of languaging by reading, once that skill is acquired. A similar expectation holds for persons scoring low on measures of auding-we expect them to score low on measures of reading.
Thus, Hypothesis 2 states that performance on measures of ability to comprehend language by auding taken before reading is learned will be predictive of performance on measures of ability to comprehend language by reading after the decoding skills involved in reading have been acquired.
It is important to note that Hypothesis 2 is specifically addressed to relationships between auding and reading comprehension test performance. We are not concerned here with relationships between such things as auditory discrimination, phonemic segmentation, matching rhyming words, and the like, which are frequently measured in "reading readiness" tests, and achievement in learning to read at the end of the first grade. Rather, our interest is in relationships between comprehending thoughts by language through auding and comprehending thoughts by language through reading.
Ideally, what we would like to have found are studies in which children of kindergarten age were assessed with regard to auding ability, and then longitudinally followed to relate auding ability to reading ability. Because Hypothesis 2 predicts relationships between auding and reading after reading decoding skills are thoroughly learned, we would expect to find correlations between auding ability and reading ability fairly low in the early school grades, when children are a more homogeneous, nearly illiterate group. Then, as reading decoding skills are acquired, and the child is able to access more and more of his oral language competencies and hence his conceptual base via print, correlations between auding and reading should increase. Thus we would expect to find correlations low in the early, primary grades, with an increase in magnitude over the school years.