Defining phonological awareness and its relationship to early reading.

Abstract

Phonological awareness (PA) has been operationally defined by many different tasks, and task comparisons have been confounded by differing levels of linguistic complexity among items. A sample of 113 kindergartners and first graders completed PA tasks designed to separate task difficulty from linguistic complexity. These measures were, in turn, compared with measures of early literacy. Results indicated that the measures loaded on a single factor and that PA measured by differences in linguistic complexity, rather than by task differences, seemed to be more closely related to that factor. A logical analysis suggested that alphabet knowledge is necessary for children to separate onsets from rimes and that awareness of onsets and rimes is necessary both for word reading and for more complex levels of phonemic analysis. The relationship between phonological awareness1 and early reading has been well established since the 1970s (see Adams, 1990, for a review). Phonological awareness is an awareness of sounds in spoken (not written) words that is revealed by such abilities as rhyming, matching initial consonants, and counting the number of phonemes in spoken words. These tasks are difficult for some children because spoken words do not have identifiable segments that correspond to phonemes; for example, the word dog consists of one physical speech sound. In alphabetic languages, however, letters usually represent phonemes, and to learn about the correspondences between letters and phonemes, the child has to be aware of the phonemes in spoken words. Evidence for the importance of phonological awareness