ABSTRACT :Perfetti's representational quality hypothesis suggests that orthographic learning in developing readers is associated with two important changes to the orthographic lexicon that drive continued word reading development, namely, addition of word-specific representations and acquisition of complex context-dependent decoding skills. Perfetti further hypothesizes that these two changes are mutually fa-cilitative suggesting a bidirectional relationship. To test this hypothesis, cross-lagged panel models were used to model the relationship between word reading and non-word reading longitudinally across Grades 1-4 in a diverse
sample (N = 433) of developing readers. Overall results
revealed the codevelopmental pattern between word and nonword reading to be bidirectional in nature such that word reading impacted later nonword reading and vice versa. These bidirectional relations did not differ significantly between those who qualify for free and reduced