Fine motor skills and executive function are two examples of domain-general skills. Both are correlates of arithmetic and reading ability, and have been identified as predictors of school readiness. Little research has simultaneously assessed the influence of both these skills as predictors of academic abilities. Current evidence suggests their role as predictors lessens once children enter school. Importantly this limited research often disregards the role of well-established domain-specific predictors. In this large-scale longitudinal study (N = 569) we evaluate the role of fine motor skills, executive function, and domain-specific skills at 5-years as predictors of arithmetic and reading skills at 6-years. Fine motor skills and executive function at school entry correlate strongly with each other, with the longitudinal association between fine motor skills and performance in reading and arithmetic completely accounted for by variance shared with executive function skills. However, neither executive function nor fine motor skills account for variance in reading or arithmetic after controlling for more proximal predictors of these skills. If either fine motor or executive function skills promote learning in school, it seems their effects on reading and arithmetic development may be mediated by more proximal skills. From an applied perspective, this study casts doubt on the usefulness of motor skills as a target for intervention to support academic performance, at least after school entry. It also highlights the need to examine more closely the relations between domain-general and domain-specific skills in early development.

精细运动技能和执行功能是领域通用技能的两个例子。两者都与算术和阅读能力相关，并已被确定为入学准备情况的预测指标。很少有研究同时评估这两种技能作为学术能力预测指标的影响。目前的证据表明，一旦孩子上学，它们作为预测因素的作用就会减弱。重要的是，这种有限的研究通常忽视了成熟的特定领域预测器的作用。在这项大规模纵向研究中（N = 569) 我们评估了 5 岁时精细运动技能、执行功能和特定领域技能作为 6 岁算术和阅读技能的预测指标的作用。入学时的精细运动技能和执行功能彼此密切相关，精细运动技能与阅读和算术表现之间的纵向关联完全由与执行功能技能共享的差异来解释。然而，在控制了这些技能的更接近的预测因素后，执行功能和精细运动技能都不能解释阅读或算术的差异。如果精细运动或执行功能技能促进了学校的学习，那么它们对阅读和算术发展的影响似乎可能受到更近端技能的调节。从应用的角度来看，这项研究质疑运动技能作为干预目标以支持学业成绩的有用性，至少在入学后是这样。它还强调需要在早期开发中更仔细地检查领域通用技能和特定领域技能之间的关系。