A longitudinal study on the development of English phonological awareness in preschool children

This study investigated the development of English phonological awareness in preschool children based on a longitudinal study. It carried out a phonological matching task, mispronunciation task, articulation test, explicit phoneme awareness task, rhyme matching task, and initial-phoneme matching task for three-, four- and five-year-old children. A letter knowledge test was also added to the tests for the 5-year-old children. The results revealed that the development of phonological awareness follows a progression of syllable, then onset and rhyme, then phoneme. It was also revealed that language skills such as vocabulary, detection of mispronunciations, and articulation were partially related to the development of phoneme awareness. Finally, we also found that letter knowledge partially affected the children’s development of phonological awareness.