Studied acquisition of the alphabetic principle in preliterate children, 3-5 yrs. The dependent variable throughout was a forced-choice between, e.g., "mow" and "sow" as pronunciations for the written word mow after the child had been taught to read the words mat and sat. Reliable performance on this transfer task was only achieved by children who (a) understood two aspects of phonological organization-phonemic segmentation of the speech items and the identity of their initial segments, and (b) had learned graphic symbols for the sounds u m" and "s." Most children who demonstrated alphabetic insight with symbols in word-initial position were also successful at transfer when the symbols were word-final. Thus, phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme knowledge were needed in combination for acquisition of the alphabetic principle, and, once gained, alphabetic insight proved relatively robust. Implications for reading acquisition are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate a new program designed to teach young children about phonological structure. The program emphasizes recognition of phoneme identity across words. The experimental group of 64 preschoolers was trained with the program for 12 weeks, and the 62 controls were exposed to the same materials, stripped of reference to phonology. Comparison of pretraining and posttraining measures of phonemic awareness showed greater gains by the experimental group in comparison with controls. The increased levels of phonemic awareness occurred with untrained as well as trained sounds. A forced-choice word-recognition test showed that most of the children who possessed phonemic awareness and who knew relevant letter sounds could use their knowledge to decode unfamiliar printed words. The results are consistent with the claim that phonological awareness and letter knowledge in combination are necessary but not sufficient for acquisition of the alphabetic principle.Children vary in how well they can manipulate and make judgments about the phonemic segments of speech. This variation in phonemic awareness affects reading and spelling skills, as has been shown by correlational studies (e.g.

A follow-up of a study evaluating a program to teach young children about phonemic structure is reported. In the original study (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991a), preschoolers were trained with the program for 12 weeks and gained in phonemic awareness and knowledge of the alphabetic principle as compared with a control group. The children were retested at the end of kindergarten on phonemic awareness, word identification, decoding, and spelling. Children who entered school with advanced levels of phonemic awareness scored significantly higher on each of the measures. Alphabetic knowledge predicted literacy development, but phonemic awareness accounted for significant additional variance in decoding and spelling. Verbal intelligence did not influence reading and spelling performance. Other parts of the data led to the conclusion that some aspects of phonemic awareness may be a consequence of literacy instruction rather than a cause.Recently we reported the development and evaluation of a program to teach phonemic awareness to preschool and kindergarten children (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991a), and in this article we report a 1-year follow-up of the evaluation data. The program, entitled Sound Foundations (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1991b), focuses on phoneme invariance by teaching children that different words can begin, or end, with the same sound. There are large color posters depicting scenes with many objects beginning with the same phoneme (sun, seal, sailor, sand, etc.) and other posters with objects ending with the same phoneme (bus, house, octopus, dress, etc.). The kit also contains games, worksheets, and an audio tape, all designed to teach the concept of sound sharing among words. For a more complete description, see Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley (1991a).The design of the program was guided by experiments that we conducted previously on the role of phonemic awareness in the child's acquisition of the alphabetic principle (

This article reports a follow-up study of children in Grades 1 and 2 who had been instructed in phonemic awareness in preschool. Compared to a control condition, the trained children were superior in nonword reading 2 and 3 years later and in reading comprehension at 3 years. Control children furnished a disproportionate number of readers dependent on sight word reading. The superiority of the experimental condition did not extend to measures of automaticity in reading. W. A. Hoover and P. B. Gough's (1990) "simple view" of reading (Reading Comprehension = Listening Comprehension X Decoding) was supported. In a supplementary experiment, preschool children were trained with the program by their regular teachers and showed greater progress in aspects of phonemic awareness than the control condition from the main experiment. However, they did not gain as much as those in the more intensely trained experimental condition.

Grade 5 children who had been trained in phoneme identity 6 years earlier in preschool were superior to untrained controls on irregular word reading; on a composite list of nonwords, regular words, and irregular words; and on a separate nonword test. Some of the trained children had become poor readers by Grade 5. These poor readers had made slow progress in achieving phonemic awareness in preschool even though they were eventually successful. In general, the rate at which trained children achieved phonemic awareness in preschool accounted for variance in school literacy progress in addition to that accounted for by the actual level of phonemic awareness achieved. Preschool instruction in phonemic structure had modest but detectable effects on later reading skill, but children who were slow to achieve phonemic awareness tended to be hampered in later reading growth.