*Syllables; Teaching Methods IDENTIFIERS *Syllabication Ability

While previous studies have investigated children's awareness of two units within words--syllables and phonemes, there is experimental evidence that children are also aware of intrasyllabic units (units intermediate in size between the syllable and the phoneme), and that these units may be useful for teaching phonological awareness and reading. Two experiments investigated children's awareness of phonemes and of two intrasyllabic units, onset (the initial consonant or consonant cluster) and rime (the vowel and any following consonants) in spoken words. Fifty-six kindergarten students participated in the first experiment, and results indicated that while they were aware of both syllables and intrasyllabic units in a word comparison task, they were not aware of phonemes in the same task. Results of the second experiment, in which 20 first grade students compared words differing only in onse