Emergent literacy skills, behavior problems and familial antecedents of reading difficulties: a follow-up study of reading achievement from kindergarten to fifth grade.

Costa et al. (2013) followed a group of children from preschool through fifth grade.

They asked: Does a family history of reading trouble, plus teacher-noted inattention, forecast later reading problems?

Teachers rated kids’ attention each year. Parents reported any family reading issues. The team tracked reading scores every grade.

Kids who entered school with both family reading risk and high inattention scores were far more likely to stay poor readers through fifth grade.

Family risk alone mattered, but adding early attention red flags sharpened the prediction.

Gonzalez-Barrero et al. (2018) extends this picture. They started at age 2 and showed that children who had both receptive and expressive language delays, plus family dyslexia risk, still struggled with reading comprehension at age 16.

Boets et al. (2011) looked even earlier. They found that weak auditory processing in kindergarten—like trouble hearing speech in noise—also predicted third-grade reading failure.

Willems et al. (2016) clustered kids who already had reading disability. One cluster had heavy family risk and looked just like the high-risk group here, showing the same pattern inside a disabled sample.

Beck et al. (2021) found a similar inattention effect, but in math: girls with early inattention kept falling behind, while boys partly caught up. The attention link crosses subjects.

If you screen preschoolers, add two quick boxes: family reading problems and teacher concern about attention. When both are checked, move the child to extra monitoring and early phonics-rich instruction. No new test kit is needed—just use what teachers and parents already know.