2 Early Precursors of Reading-Relevant Phonological Skills

There is a great deal of evidence that phonological awareness is a prerequisite for reading an alphabetic orthography (McCardle, Scarborough, & Catts, 2001; NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2005; Scarborough, 1998, 2005; Walley, Metsala, & Garlock, 2003). Phonological awareness at the level of the phoneme, the aspect most relevant to learning to recognize words in print, does not develop spontaneously, but depends on specific learning and instruction (e.g., Byrne, 1998; Goswami, 2002). Other aspects of phonological awareness, such as rhyme sensitivity and the associated factor of phonological memory, do develop spontaneously in preschool children, but the nature of their relationship to phoneme awareness and reading readiness is not clear. Moreover, connections between phonological awareness in preschool and school-aged children and the early phonological sensitivities of infants and toddlers have not been systematically studied. Further, there are sizable gaps in our understanding of relationships between early preliterate phonological sensitivities, individual variation in vocabulary development, and language development more generally. Broadly speaking, phonological awareness is the ability to reflect on the building blocks of word forms (Liberman, 1999; Mattingly, 1972). It is a species of metalinguistic awareness, other types of which include morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic awareness (Chaney, 1992; Tunmer, Herriman, & Nesdale, 1988). Performance on metalinguistic “awareness” tasks relies on at least two factors. First, the relevant level of structure (e.g., phonemes) must be present in the child’s cognitive organization (Fowler, 1991; Metsala & Walley, 1998; Walley et al., 2003). Second, the child must be able to consciously access those same elements of linguistic structure (Vygotsky, 1962). Certainly, at about the same time that infants’ phonological and lexical systems are beginning to develop toward an adult-like state, their domain-general memory and cognitive abilities are also beginning to take shape (Diamond, 1985; Lalonde & Werker, 1995; Tomlinson-Keasey, Eisert,