The effects of two types of oral-language training programs on development of phonological awareness skills and word learning ability was examined. One of the training programs provided explicit instruction on both analytic (segmenting) and synthetic (blending) phonological tasks; the other program trained synthetic skills only. Effects of these programs were contrasted with a language-experience control group that received no phonologically oriented training. Forty-eight kindergarten children participated in small-group training sessions 3 times per week for 7-8 weeks