Associations Between PASS Cognitive Processes and Early Literacy Skills in Preschool Children

This study examined associations between Planning, Attention, Simultaneous Processing, and Successive Processing (PASS) cognitive processes and early literacy skills in 150 preschool children attending two public schools in Istanbul, Türkiye. Cognitive processes were assessed using the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS), and early literacy was assessed using the Early Literacy Test (EROT). Zero-order and age-adjusted Spearman correlations showed consistently strong positive associations between CAS and EROT scores; age-adjusted correlations ranged from ρ = 0.640 to 0.846, with the CAS Total–EROT Total association remaining ρ = 0.846. The four PASS process scores were also strongly intercorrelated (Pearson’s r = 0.732–0.882), indicating substantial overlap among the cognitive-process measures. In hierarchical regression, the four PASS processes accounted for substantial additional variance in EROT total performance beyond age (ΔR2 = 0.756), with the full model explaining 75.9% of the variance. Attention (β = 0.376, p = .007) and Successive Processing (β = 0.329, p = .015) showed statistically significant conditional associations in the full sample. Complementary dominance analysis indicated the largest average relative contribution for Attention, although overlapping bootstrap distributions did not support a clearly differentiated hierarchy among the four PASS processes. After false discovery rate (FDR) correction across 28 PASS coefficient-level tests from seven subtest-specific regression models, seven process–skill associations remained statistically significant in the full sample, compared with two in the previously screened sensitivity sample (N = 138). At the subtest level, the Simultaneous Processing–Letter Knowledge association remained significant after FDR correction in both analytic samples, whereas the Attention–Functional Knowledge association met the FDR-adjusted significance criterion only in the screened sensitivity sample (N = 138). Overall, broad PASS–early literacy associations were robust, whereas process-specific patterns were more sensitive to analytic specification. Given the cross-sectional design and substantial shared variance among the PASS processes, the findings should not be interpreted as evidence of causal or exclusive process–skill relationships.