Phonological Skills Are (Probably) One Cause of Success in Learning to Read: A Comment on Castles and

Castles and Coltheart (2004) argued that the causal link between children’s underly-ing phonological awareness and success in learning to read remains unproven. We ar-gue that the balance of evidence does favor such a causal link. We also argue, how-ever, that learning to read depends on broader language skills and that, like other aspects of development, it needs to be seen in the context of a multicausal system. Castles and Coltheart (2004) in their recent review argued that the causal link be-tween children’s phonological awareness and success in learning to read remains unproven. Here we provide a commentary on their article, focusing particularly on the logic of the evidence relevant to such a claim for alphabetic scripts. We argue that their conception of causation is overly narrow and the fact that the effects of phoneme awareness on learning to read may be moderated or mediated by other variables (such as letter knowledge [LK]) does nothing to weaken or compromise the status of such effects as true causes. We also argue that Castles and Coltheart’