KNOWLEDGE OF THE ALPHABET AND EXPLICIT AWARENESS OF PHONEMES IN PRE-READERS - THE NATURE OF THE RELATIONSHIP

This study was carried out to examine the extent to which preschool ch ildren are aware of the phonemic structure of the spoken word and to i nvestigate how they acquire that knowledge. The four year old non-read ers carried out a battery of tasks designed to assess product name rea ding ability, knowledge of the alphabet, rhyme skills and explicit pho nemic awareness ability. There was evidence that they generally acquir ed knowledge of the alphabet before they showed explicit phonemic awar eness 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 tha t accounted for by rhyme skills but that rhyme ability accounted for n o unique variance beyond that accounted for by alphabet knowledge. Fur ther analyses showed that alphabet knowledge also contributed unique v ariance to product name reading ability over and above that accounted for by phonemic awareness ability but that the reverse was not the cas e. It was hypothesised that many preschool non-readers may start to ga in an insight into the phonemic structure of the spoken word by becomi ng aware of the connection between the sounds of letters in environmen tal print and the sounds of the spoken word.