Phonological awareness (PA) has been operationally defined by many different tasks, and task comparisons have been confounded by differing levels of linguistic complexity among items. A sample of 113 kindergartners and first graders completed PA tasks designed to separate task difficulty from linguistic complexity. These measures were, in turn, compared with measures of early literacy. Results indicated that the measures loaded on a single factor and that PA measured by differences in linguistic complexity, rather than by task differences, seemed to be more closely related to that factor. A logical analysis suggested that alphabet knowledge is necessary for children to separate onsets from rimes and that awareness of onsets and rimes is necessary both for word reading and for more complex levels of phonemic analysis.

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The type of phoneme awareness that supports reading acquisition has been unclear. Phoneme awareness is usually operational zed as skill in manipulating phonemes in blending and segmentation tasks. However, B. Byrne and R. Fielding-Barnsley (1990) argued that phoneme awareness is knowledge of phoneme identities (i.e., recognition of individual phonemes in spoken word contexts). In a double-blind teaching experiment, 48 kindergartners were randomly assigned to identity, manipulation, or language experience programs. Children in the manipulation program made significantly greater gains on tests of blending and segmentation. However, children in the identity program made significantly greater gains on a test of phonetic cue reading, a measure of rudimentary decoding ability. Teaching recognition of particular phonemes in word contexts may help beginners gain insight into the alphabetic principle and apply their insights in early word identification.

To test the validity of the Test of Phoneme Identities

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