WHAT IS PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

Phonological awareness was hypothesized to be composed of at least 3 c omponent skills-IQ, verbal short-term memory, and speech perception. I n addition, 4 linguistic manipulations within 3 phonological awareness tasks were theorized to affect item difficulties. Multiple measures o f IQ, verbal short-term memory, speech perception, and phonological aw areness were administered to 136 3rd and 4th graders. Application of s tructural equation modeling revealed that IQ, speech perception, and v erbal short-term memory each contributed unique variance to the phonol ogical awareness construct. All 4 experimental linguistic manipulation s influenced phonological awareness item difficulties as well. Results underscore the importance of speech perception for phonological aware ness.