Knowledge of the alphabet and explicit awareness of phonemes in pre-readers: The nature of the relationship

Abstract

This study was carried out to examine the extent to which preschool children are aware of the phonemic structure of the spoken word and to investigate how they acquire that knowledge. The four year old non-readers carried out a battery of tasks designed to assess product name reading ability, knowledge of the alphabet, rhyme skills and explicit phonemic awareness ability. There was evidence that they generally acquired knowledge of the alphabet before they showed explicit phonemic awareness ability. Fixed order regression analyses showed that ability to read and write the alphabet generally accounted for unique variance in phoneme awareness and product name reading ability over and above that accounted for by rhyme skills but that rhyme ability accounted for no unique variance beyond that accounted for by alphabet knowledge. Further analyses showed that alphabet knowledge also contributed unique variance to product name reading ability over and above that accounted for by phonemic awareness ability but that the reverse was not the case. It was hypothesised that many preschool non-readers may start to gain an insight into the phonemic structure of the spoken word by becoming aware of the connection between the sounds of letters in environmental print and the sounds of the spoken word. © 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers.