New research suggests that mechanisms involved in fine motor skills play an important role in reading and writing development. Extending past work that focused on fine motor skills measured in adolescence, the present study followed children longitudinally from ages 5 to 7 to examine early literacy and associated sets of fine motor skills, including visual-spatial integration and specfically grapho-motor skills. The current sample of 883 children (M_age = 6.78) from 80 geographically dispersed schools in Singapore was administered the Inventory of Early Development—3rd Edition (IED-III Standardised) assessment, to assess their visual-spatial integration and grapho-motor skills, and the Wide Range Abilities Test, 4th Edition (WRAT-4) to evaluate their reading as well as spelling in English. After controlling for age, maternal education, non-verbal intelligence, verbal memory, and inhibitory control, grapho-motor skill explained significant unique variance in reading (6%) and in spelling (3%) performance. This corroborates the role fine motor processes play in early literacy development in the context of Singapore, where there is less emphasis on non-academic skills even at an early age. Knowing the association of grapho-motor skills with these two literacy domains suggests potential avenues for improving future pedagogies for literacy skills.

新的研究表明，涉及精细运动技能的机制在阅读和写作发展中起着重要作用。本研究扩展了过去的工作重点，即青春期测得的精细运动技能，该研究纵向跟踪了5至7岁的儿童，以检查早期识字和相关的精细运动技能集，包括视觉空间整合和特定的图形运动技能。当前样本的883名儿童（M_岁） = 6.78）对来自新加坡80所地理位置分散的学校的《早期发展清单》（第3版（IED-III标准化））进行了评估，以评估其视觉空间整合和图形运动技能，并进行了《第四版能力测验》 （WRAT-4）评估他们的阅读以及英语拼写。在控制了年龄，母体教育，非语言智力，言语记忆和抑制性控制之后，绘画运动技能解释了阅读（6％）和拼写（3％）表现的显着独特差异。在新加坡的背景下，这证实了精细运动过程在早期识字发展中所起的作用，在新加坡，即使在很小的时候，对非学术技能的重视也很少。