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The assistance of John Holahan, who bore responsibility for maintaining and updating the database, is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due to Lois Dreyer, who supervised the testing of the children. In addition, we acknowledge many others at the Yale University Center for the Study of Learning and Attention Disorders and at Haskins Laboratories, whose help was essential to the completion of the project. Finally, we thank Linda Kimbrough for her work on preparation of this article.

Many studies have established an association between early reading problems and deficiencies in certain spoken language skills, such as the ability to become aware of the syllabic structure of spoken words, and the ability to retain a string of words in verbal short-term memory. A longitudinal study now shows that inferior performance in kindergarten tests of these same skills may presage future reading problems in the first grade. Based on these findings, procedures are suggested for kindergarten screening and for some ways of aiding children who, by virtue of inferior performance on these tests, might be considered at risk for reading failure.

The early evidence pertaining to the development of phonological segmentation abilities and their relation to reading was collected with English-speaking subjects. Although data from other languages have been obtained, explicit cross-language comparisons have not been made. It was considered that since languages vary in their phonological structures, they may also vary in the demands they make on the beginning reader. The present study compared the segmentation abilities of Italian children with those of English-speaking (American) children using the same methods of assessment and the same subject-selection criteria. At the preschool level, though the Italian children manifested a higher level of performance overall, their pattern of performance paralleled that obtained earlier with American children. In both groups, syllable segmentation ability was stronger than phoneme segmentation. After school entrance, this pattern remained unchanged in American children but was reversed in Italian beginning readers. In both language groups, however, phonemic segmentation ability distinguished children of different levels of reading skill. The discrepancies between the language groups were seen as reflecting phonologic and orthographic differences between the languages.Those who would become proficient readers of a language that is written with an alphabet face a common problem: they must understand that the written letters represent segments of words. For this reason, mastery of an alphabetic system requires a metalinguistic capability that is quite unnecessary for acquisition of the spoken language, namely, some degree of metalinguistic awareness that words have those sublexical segments, the phonemes (Liberman, 1971(Liberman, , 1973. We