An investigation of the origins and development of phonological awareness in pre-literate children /

Despite the fact that phonological awareness (PA) is one of the strongest predictors of reading acquisition, relatively little is known about its origins and development. Theories of spoken word representation and cognitive control were examined to explore the respective roles of linguistic and cognitive factors in the development of PA following debate in the research literature regarding the linguistic versus cognitive basis of PA. Pre-literate, kindergarten children were administered tasks assessing PA, spoken word representation in long-term memory, phonological encoding in working memory, and cognitive control at the beginning and end of the kindergarten year. At the end of grade one, the same children were administered tasks of reading in order to investigate the roles of PA and each of the linguistic and cognitive factors in the development of reading skills. While the ability to phonologically encode spoken words in working memory was a significant predictor of PA, spoken word representation in long-term memory and cognitive control were not causally related to PA. PA was the best predictor of the development of word identification skills in children; however, spoken word representation in long-term memory may play a role in the development of reading comprehension skills. These findings refute the theory of spoken word representation in long-term memory proposed by Walley (1993) and Fowler (1991) and suggest that the causal relationship between cognitive control and PA obtained by Tunmer et al. (1988) may be due to methodological shortcomings in their investigation. Finally, the theory that awareness of an awareness of phonemes arises from the acquisition of reading skills is challenged with the findings that pre-literate phoneme awareness is a significant predictor of reading ability approximately 18 months later. The implications of these findings for the diagnosis of reading disability and reading remediation are discussed