DEFINING PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO EARLY READING

Phonological awareness (PA) has been operationally defined by many dif ferent tasks. and task comparisons have been confounded by differing l evels of linguistic complexity among items. A sample of 113 kindergart ners and first graders completed PA tasks designed to separate task di fficulty from linguistic complexity. These measures were. in turn, com pared with measures of early literacy. Results indicated that the meas ures loaded on a single factor and that PA measured by differences in linguistic complexity, rather than by task differences, seemed to be m ore closely related to that factor. A logical analysis suggested that alphabet knowledge is necessary for children to separate onsets from r imes and that awareness of onsets and rimes is necessary both for word reading and for more complex levels of phonemic analysis.