The nature of prereaders' phonological processing abilities

Abstract

We investigated the nature of prereaders' phonological processing abilities by giving 111 preschool nonreaders a battery of 12 phonological processing tasks. Each task represented one of three kinds of phonological processing: phonological awareness, phonological coding in lexical access, and phonological coding in working memory. Five alternative models of the nature of prereaders' phonological processing abilities were tested by their fit to the covariances among phonological processing tasks after IQ had been partialled out. Our results provide evidence for two coherent phonological processing abilities in prereaders that are independent of IQ: phonological coding in working memory and phonological coding in lexical access. Performance on common measures of phonological awareness appears to be a function of efficiency of phonological coding in working memory. Our results call into question the view that phonological awareness, narrowly defined, is what is being measured by common-awareness measures and, by implication, that phonological awareness in and of itself is consequential to successful acquisition of beginning reading skills. Rather, the ability to make productive use of phonological information in coding information may be what really matters, and whether or not awareness enables use is an important unresolved issue. We conclude by considering the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.