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Leer, lo mismo que comprender un mensaje oral, es un acto que hace intervenir una serie de competencias de naturaleza lingüística. Al comenzar el aprendizaje de la lectura, alrededor de los seis años, el niño posee la competencia lingüística necesaria para producir frases perfectamente inteligibles y comprender las que llegan a sus oídos. Aprender a leer va a consistir para él en descubrir cómo utilizar parte de este dispositivo destinado inicialmente a ocuparse de la lengua oral a partir de informaciones visuales, es decir, del texto escrito. El resultado final del proceso de lectura, la comprensión del mensaje escrito, es idéntico: al obtenido cuando el mensaje llega por la vía oral. Las diferencias que: existen entre las dos formas de alcanzar el significado provienen de los aspectos específicos de cada una de ellas.

Two experimental tasks, a speech segmentation and a short-term memory task, were presented to children who began to learn to read following either the "phonic" or the "wholeword" method. The segmentation task required the child to reverse two segments (either two phones or two syllables) in an utterance. The phonic group performed significantly better than the whole-wordgroup in the "phonic reversal" task, but no difference appeared in the "syllable reversal" task. This indicated III that most children by the age of 6 years are ready to discover that speech consists of a sequence of phones and (2) that the moment at which they do it is influenced by the way they are taught to read. In the memory task, the children recalled series of visually presented items whose names either rhymed or did not. The difference in performance for the rhyming and nonrhyming series was significant in both groups. It was no greater for the phonic than for the whole-word group and was uncorrelated with the "phonic reversal" task. These results are discussed in connection with the distinction between ways of lexical access and ways of representing verbal information in short-term memory. 451Although children are competent speakers and hearers of language when they begin to learn to read, that competence does not guarantee their success at reading. In order to read, the child must master a new code that gives access to linguistic knowledge from vision rather than from sound. The new code apparently presents considerable difficulties to a substantial number of children, and some fail to cope with it at all. Since the alphabet represents speech at the level of the phoneme, to read in an alphabetic system requires the ability to explicitly analyze speech into phones, at least during the initial stages of the Iearning-to-read process, as well as for reading new words.' Several authors (see, for instance, Liberman, 1971Liberman, , 1973 Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974;Rozin, Poritsky, & Sotsky, 1971) have claimed, quite convincingly, that one of the most important causes of difficulty in learning to read may be the inability to segment speech into phones. Indeed, some underlying capacity is necessary for the ability to develop, and no training, per se, can be a sufficient condition. But it seems, on the basis of illiterate adults' performance in segmentation tasks (Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979), that the ability does not appear spontaneously, so it can be hypothesized that it generally emerges in the learning-to-read situation itself. The most important question is thus how the child becomes aware of the phonetic structure of speech during the learning-to-read process. The development of The present research was partially subsidized by grants to the first author from the Belgian Fond de la Recherche Fondamentale Collective (Contract 2.4535.79) and from the Fond de la Recherche Scientiflque Medicale (Contract 3.4553.79). We wish to thank Virginia Mann for a number of interesting comments and suggestions and Mireill...

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The metaphonological abilities of illiterate Spanish‐speaking people were evaluated. A group of rudimentary readers who have had deficient schooling was taken as control. The subjects were asked to discriminate between pairs of syllables that are minimally different in terms of phonetic features, to evaluate rhyme relations, to judge whether or not a particular phoneme or syllable was present in an utterance, and to delete and reverse phonemes and syllables. The results show that illiterates are quite good at phonetic discrimination. Almost half of them demonstrated an unequivocal ability to appreciate rhyme. However, their performance on the syllable tasks, and especially on the phoneme tasks, was very poor. There was almost no overlap between the scores of illiterates and rudimentary readers in the phonemic tasks. The present study confirms previous indications that phonemic awareness does not develop as a mere consequence of cognitive or linguistic maturation. It extends this claim to languages that, like Spanish, possess only a small set of vowels. On the other hand, the lack of phonemic awareness does not imply any substantial inferiority in phonemic sensitivity, i.e. the ability to discriminate between minimal pairs.