Development of phonological awareness and reading acquisition

Abstract

The work is aimed at studying the relations between different levels of phonological awareness and early reading ability. Ten different metaphonological tasks as well as a reading (syllables and word decoding) test were administered to kindergarteners and first graders. The correlations between metaphonological abilities and reading were highly significant for the kindergarteners. In the tasks involving sensitivity to phonological similarities, correlations were weak and nonsignificant for the first graders. A principal components analysis shows two components at first grade: sensitivity to phonological similarities and segmental awareness. Reading was related only to the latter. The differential performance between prereaders and readers within the group of kindergarten shows that sensitivity to phonological similarities and initial isolation of segments takes precedence over alphabetic reading. Segmental awareness, however, does not develop outside the learning of the alphabetical code as the evidence provided by results in deleting, counting and reversal tasks suggests. All children who had developed segmental awareness were able to read but, interestingly enough, some good readers performed poorly in some of the segmental awareness tasks (i.e. deleting of initial phoneme).