Phonological Awareness and Learning to Read: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

The notion that the ability to segment speech into its phonological units in an explicit conscious manner, commonly termed phonological awareness, is related with learning to read, is one of the most important contributions to cognitive research on reading of the last three decades. This chapter centers on studies designed to determine whether this relationship is universal across language systems, or whether peculiarities of a given system influence the appearance, development and degree of phonological awareness. Three issues are examined. The first is whether the differences in the type of orthography learned, i.e., in the graphic units used to transcribe oral language (basically phonemes in alphabetic systems, syllables in syllabic systems, and morphemes in logographic systems) influence the development of conscious phonological representations. The second is whether the course of development of phonological awareness in alphabetic systems is affected by differences in the degree of orthographic transparency with respect to phonology. The third question this chapter tries to answer is whether characteristics of oral language, specifically phonology, introduce variations in the developmental course of phonological awareness. The concept of phonological awareness is briefly introduced, and the findings of studies that compared phonological skills in native-speaking children of languages with non-alphabetic (Japanese and Chinese) and alphabetic orthographies are discussed. This is followed by a look at studies that compared children growing up in a context characterized by alphabetic languages with a transparent or opaque orthography. In the concluding section I note that although phonological skills are important in learning to read in any language system and a common substrate of phonological awareness exists in all languages, conscious phonological representations are strongly dependent on the type of orthographic and phonologic input that children process. The degree of phonological awareness attained varies between languages, with the highest levels, in which the subject is aware of each phoneme that the words are formed of, being reached only in alphabetic languages. Within this group of languages, the degree of orthographic transparency further influences the sequence of development of phonological awareness, in terms of both the time of appearance (earlier in transparent orthographies) and the predominance of specific levels at given times (intrasyllabic units in opaque; phonemes in transparent orthographies). The development of phonological awareness is also shaped by the characteristics of oral language.