The foundations of literacy: Learning the sounds of letters

Learning the sounds of letters is an important part of learning to read and spell. To explore the factors that make some letter-sound correspondences easier for children to learn than others, we first analyzed knowledge of le tters' sounds (and names) by 660 children between 31/2 and 71/2 years old. A second study examined preschoolers' (M age 4 years, 11 months) ability to learn various sound-letter mappings. Together, the results show that an im portant determinant of letter-sound knowledge is whether the sound occurs i n the name of the letter and, if so, whether it is at the beginning or the end. The properties of the sound itself (consonant versus vowel, sonorant v ersus obstruent, stop versus continuant) appear to have little or no influe nce on children's learning of basic letter-sound correspondences. The findi ngs show that children use their knowledge of letters' names when learning the letters' sounds rather than memorizing letter-sound correspondences as arbitrary pairings.