Preschool Phonological Awareness and Subsequent Literacy Development

There is an unresolved debate in the developmental literature regarding whether phonemic awareness is acquired naturally as part of phonological awareness, or whether it is instead an artefact of reading tuition. This ambiguity affects the interpretation of studies which show that pre‐literate phonemic awareness is a powerful predictor of literacy attainment in school. There is also evidence to suggest that spoken word recognition might contribute to literacy development. The present study therefore initially assessed 30 preschool, pre‐literate children on a battery of tests designed to provide a profile of pre‐literate phonological awareness. The reading and spelling ability of these children was then monitored at the end of each school term for five terms. Results suggest that young children can develop phonemic awareness before beginning reading or attending school, and that children's pre‐literate rhyme detection ability is the best predictor of initial reading development. Spoken word recognition also contributed to spelling ability at the end of the first term in school. Spelling ability was consistently found to be superior to reading ability throughout the duration of the study. These results are suggested to support the idea that word recognition plays an early, but important, role in the initial development of spelling ability and that spelling facilitates the development of alphabetic awareness in children's reading. The results generally support growing evidence that rhyme awareness is associated with literacy as a predictor and discriminates between good and poor readers.