Abstract
Research on young children's word awareness, the ability to identify the lexical constituents of a meaningful utterance, has received different interpretations: Either word awareness is related to linguistic and cognitive changes associated with the early school years or is a concept that children can learn when appropriate techniques are employed. This study was devised to clarify the nature of variables influencing word awareness during early childhood by analyzing responses of 26 kindergarten and 24 first-grade children to the Homophones Test of Word Awareness. Responses were assigned to seven categories representing a continuum characterized as ranging from discrete to global. Older children made fewer errors, and they gave a higher proportion of discrete responses. Younger children gave more global responses. Memory was evidently not the source of the younger children's inability to perform as well as the older ones. Rather, the difficulty appeared to stem from the younger children's inability to divorce sound from meaning in spoken messages. The role of developmental factors in children's conscious awareness of language structure and lexical units is supported by these findings.
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