Memory and Early Reading Skills Fuel Each Other, Four-Year Study of Children Reveals

A child’s ability to remember and a child’s grasp of the building blocks of reading do not develop on separate tracks. According to a new longitudinal study published in BMC Psychology, memory and emergent literacy rise and fall together throughout the preschool years, each one consistently predicting growth in the other as children move from age three to age six. The findings, drawn from more than 1,600 children followed across four annual assessments, offer some of the clearest evidence yet that the relationship between these two foundational capacities is genuinely bidirectional, and that it operates both through stable differences between children and through moment-to-moment developmental change within each child.

The research, conducted by Jin-long Liang and Xin-ling Cui of the College of Education Sciences at Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, China, drew on caregiver-reported data from the KIT longitudinal study, formally known as the Kids in Taiwan: National Longitudinal Study of Child Development and Care. The analytic sample comprised 1,694 children, each assessed at approximately 36, 48, 60, and 72 months of age. By tracking the same children at four points across three years, the researchers could ask a question that single-snapshot studies cannot answer: does memory at one age predict literacy skills a year later, above and beyond what the child’s literacy level already suggested?

Emergent literacy, the construct at the heart of the study, refers to the precocious skills that precede formal reading instruction. In this dataset, it was measured with six caregiver-rated items capturing a child’s understanding of common signs and pictorial symbols such as traffic lights, the ability to orient a book correctly, awareness that a picture book’s cover carries information such as the title and author, knowledge of where print begins on a page, the capacity to recognize simple Chinese characters such as one’s own name, and the ability to express ideas through drawings or written symbols like drawing diaries or object lists. Memory, by contrast, was assessed with a broader 18-item scale that included pretend play, recalling and stating personal details such as age, birth month, and telephone numbers, counting accurately to 21 and later to 100, identifying previously seen storybooks, and distinguishing living from nonliving things.

At the simplest descriptive level, the results confirmed what developmental scientists would expect: average scores on both constructs climbed steadily with age, and children who scored high on memory at any given wave also tended to score high on emergent literacy at that same wave, and at every other wave. But the study’s real contribution lies in how it disentangled the direction of these associations over time. The researchers employed two complementary statistical frameworks. The first, a traditional cross-lagged panel model, or CLPM, estimates overall longitudinal associations between the two constructs across the four waves. The second, a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model, or RI-CLPM, is a more recent refinement that separates stable, trait-like differences between children from time-specific deviations within each child, a distinction that has become central to modern longitudinal methodology.

The traditional CLPM told a strikingly consistent story about memory. In all three one-year intervals, memory scores prospectively predicted subsequent emergent literacy scores, even after accounting for prior literacy levels. Emergent literacy showed the reverse pattern in two of the three intervals, prospectively predicting later memory. In other words, when the two constructs were analyzed with the conventional approach, the pathway running from memory to literacy appeared somewhat more robust than the pathway running from literacy back to memory, though both directions were present in the data.

The RI-CLPM, however, is where the study delivers its most technically important insight. When the model separated each child’s stable overall standing from their wave-specific deviations, the correlation between the stable between-child components of memory and emergent literacy was a remarkable 0.81. Children who are generally stronger in memory relative to their peers are, to an extraordinary degree, also the children who are generally stronger in emergent literacy. This single statistic captures the substantial overlap between the two capacities at the level of stable individual differences, and it suggests that much of the association reported in earlier cross-sectional work may reflect this shared underlying profile rather than dynamic developmental influence.

Yet the within-child results demonstrate that the story does not end with stable traits. At the within-child level, deviations in memory were positively associated with subsequent deviations in emergent literacy across all three intervals, and deviations in emergent literacy were likewise positively associated with subsequent deviations in memory across all three intervals. This means that when a child performed better than their own typical level in memory at one assessment, they tended to perform better than their own typical level in emergent literacy at the next assessment, and vice versa. The bidirectional relationship, in other words, is not merely an artifact of some children being generally more advanced than others; it unfolds dynamically within individual developmental trajectories.

One temporal detail stands out. The largest estimated coefficient for the pathway from emergent literacy to memory appeared in the interval from 60 to 72 months, spanning the transition from age five to age six. This is precisely the period during which many children begin encountering formal or semi-formal literacy instruction, and the finding hints that as children’s print-related skills consolidate, they may increasingly feed back into the memory processes that support learning more broadly. The authors note that the prospective association from memory to emergent literacy was more consistent across the two modeling approaches than the reverse pathway, suggesting that memory may serve as the somewhat more reliable developmental engine during this age window, even as literacy skills exert their own growing influence.

Methodologically, the study is a textbook demonstration of why the choice of longitudinal model matters. Had the researchers relied solely on the traditional CLPM, they might have overinterpreted cross-lagged paths that partly reflect stable trait-level covariation. Had they relied solely on the RI-CLPM, they might have dismissed genuine within-child dynamics. By running both models on the same four-wave dataset, Liang and Cui were able to show that the longitudinal relation between memory and emergent literacy involves both stable between-child differences and time-specific within-child variation, a dual conclusion that neither model alone could have delivered. The analysis used full information maximum likelihood to handle missing data and robust estimation procedures, and the work was supported by research funding from the College of Education Sciences at Northwest Normal University.

The practical implications reach into homes, preschools, and early intervention programs. If memory skills reliably foreshadow literacy growth from age three onward, then activities that exercise young children’s recall, sequencing, and symbolic reasoning, from pretend play to storybook recognition, may pay dividends in later reading readiness. Conversely, the feedback loop from emergent literacy to memory suggests that early exposure to books, print conventions, and symbolic expression is not merely preparation for reading but an active contributor to broader cognitive development. Because the study relied on caregiver reports and secondary analysis of an existing cohort, the authors are careful to frame the findings as associations rather than causal proof, and they call for continued work with direct assessments and additional populations. Still, for parents and educators wondering whether the toddler memorizing songs and the preschooler scribbling a drawing diary are on connected journeys, this research offers a resounding answer: the two journeys are woven together, each one helping to pull the other forward through the critical years before formal schooling begins.

Subject of Research: Bidirectional longitudinal associations between memory and emergent literacy in preschool children aged 3 to 6 years.

Article Title: Longitudinal associations between memory and emergent literacy from 3 to 6 years of age: a four-wave random-intercept cross-lagged panel study

Article References: Liang, J.-L., & Cui, X.-L. (2026). Longitudinal associations between memory and emergent literacy from 3 to 6 years of age: a four-wave random-intercept cross-lagged panel study. BMC Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05598-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05598-9

Keywords: memory, emergent literacy, early childhood, longitudinal study, cross-lagged panel model, random-intercept CLPM, cognitive development, language development, preschool children, KIT study, child development, developmental psychology