PROTO-LITERACY, LITERACY AND THE ACQUISITION OF

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

RODERICK W. BARRON

UNIVERSITY OF GUELPH

ABSTRACT: Evidence from beginning readers and adult illiterates indicates that phonological awareness influences the acquisition of literacy and that literacy influ- ences the acquisition of phonological awareness. This bi-directional relationship is discussed with reference to onsets, rimes, and phonemes-intrasyllabic units of speech that correspond to orthographic units of print. It is proposed that the concep- tion of literacy be expanded to include letter-sound association knowledge, a measure of initial or proto-literacy that prereaders acquire from exposure to print. Evidence is reviewed indicating that proto-literacy may influence prereaders’ awareness of onsets and phonemes, and possible mechanisms underlying the influence of print upon awareness of these units of speech are discussed. It is concluded that phono- logical awareness is not a homogeneous skill that emerges naturally during the later stages of oral language development; instead, it is a heterogeneous skill and its acquisition involves a complex pattern of interactions between print and speech both before and after children learn to read and spell.

Over two decades of research have shown that awareness of the phonological segments making up spoken words is causally related to success in learning to read and spell. These segments are smaller than a syllable and consist of individual phonemes as well as onsets and rimes, units of spoken language structure that are intermediate in size between syllables and phonemes.

Most investigators regard phonological awareness as a skill that emerges naturally or spontaneously during the course of language development-biological (matura- tional) factors and experience with spoken language combine to provide children with the ability to attend consciously to phonological segments. This view is consis- tent with the idea that reading and spelling are fundamentally language-based pro- cesses even though visual/spatial information processing is involved in the input and output stages of their execution, respectively. By extension then, the acquisition of reading and spelling are presumed to be constrained, at least in part, by the degree of phonological awareness skill that children bring to the task of acquiring literacy.

Direct all correapondenca to: Roderick W. Barmn, Department of Psychology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario NlG 2W1, Canada.

Learning and lndivldual Differences, Volume 3, Number 3, 1991, pages 243-255. Copyright 0 1991 by JAI Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 1041-6090

244 LEARNlNG AND /ND/V/DUAL DFFERENCES VOLUME 3, NUMBER 3,lW

Evidence for the relationship between phonological awareness and literacy is consistent with this perspective. Longitudinal studies have shown that phonological awareness is related to success in learning to read (e.g., Bradley & Bryant 1983, 1985; Tumner, Herriman, & Nesdale 1988; Bryant, MacLean, Bradley & Crossland 1990). Poor readers tend to be deficient in phonological awareness (Bradley & Bryant 1978), and phonological awareness is independent of I.Q. (Wagner & Torgesen 1987; Stanovich 1986). Finally, Olson, Wise, Connors & Rack (1990) have reported evidence from twin studies indicating that there is a significant heritable component to deficits in phonological processing but not orthographic processing of print. Furthermore, the deficits in phonological processing appear to be linked to measures of phonological awareness.

SYLLABLES, ONSETS, RIMES AND PHONEMES

Recent research on phonological awareness has centered upon identifying the units of speech of which children are aware and how those units correspond to ortho- graphic units that are important in acquiring reading and spelling skill. There appear to be several types of linguistic units that are critical in phonological awareness: syllables (e.g., “top,” ” stop”), onsets (e.g., lsi, /St/), rimes (e.g., iopi), and individual phonemes (e.g., Is/, ltl, loi, lpl). An onset is a sub-syllabic unit made up of a consonant or consonant cluster (Is/, /St/) and it is not obligatory in English (i.e., some words begin with a vowel). A rime is also a sub-syllabic unit but it is obligatory, follows the onset, and consists of a vowel plus any following consonants (lopl).

Research with adults indicates that spontaneous speech errors may involve com- bining the onset of one word with the rime of a word that is similar in meaning. The intended utterance “Don’t shout,” for example, may be produced as “Don’t shell” because the onset of “shout” is combined with the rime of “yell” (MacKay 1972). Short-term memory errors for syllables also reveals an onset-rime segmentation (Treiman & Danis 1988), and onset-rime combinations are easier than other possible combinations when subjects are required to blend syllables (Treiman 1983, 1986).

This classification of the segmental structure of syllables into onsets, rimes and phonemes suggests a hierarchical organization to the structure of the syllable with the syllable itself at the top level, phonemes at the bottom level, and the onset and rime at the middle level (e.g., Treiman 1988; in press). There is evidence from research with preschoolers which is consistent with this possibility. Beginning with the syllable, there are a number of experiments involving a variety of tasks which show that children find it easier to attend to syllables than to phonemes (e.g., Fox & Routh 1975; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer & Carter, 1974).

The primary evidence for onsets and rimes comes from research by Treiman (for reviews see 1988, in press). In one study (Treiman 1985), a phoneme recognition task was used in which children had to judge whether words and nonwords con- tained a puppet’s favorite sound (e.g., Id). Four and five year-old children had more trouble recognizing the phoneme lsl when it was part of the onset of a syllable consisting of an initial cluster of consonants (e.g., “spa”) than when it was an onset consisting of a single consonant (e.g., “sap”).

PROJCI-LITERACY AND PHONOLOGlCAL AWARENESS 245

In a related set of studies, Kirtley, Bryant, MacLean & Bradley (1989) showed that five year-old children found it easier to identify the word containing the odd phoneme in a series of three, single syllable spoken words when the phoneme was the onset of the word (e.g., /cl in “doll,” “deaf, “ “can”) than when the phoneme was part of the rime (e.g., /d/in “mop,” “lead,” “whip;” lo/ in “cap,” “can,” “cot”).

These results indicate that phonological awareness is easier for syllables than for phonemes. They also indicate that phonological awareness is easier for onsets than for phonemes and for rimes than for phonemes when the phonemes are embedded within these intrasyllabic units.

BI-DIRECTIONAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND LITERACY

The “biological” perspective on the development of phonological awareness de- scribed above has led a number of investigators to assume, at least implicitly, that the c,ausal connection between phonological awareness and literacy goes in just one direction-from phonological awareness to literacy. Some of the most compelling evidence for this connection comes from longitudinal studies which show that preschoolers’ knowledge of nursery rhymes (e.g., recite Humpty Dumpty) at age three predicts their rhyming oddity task performance at age four (e.g. identify the word containing the odd middle sound lul in the series “pig,“ “wig,“ “hug;“ and the odd final sound in/ in the series “hut,” “fun,” “cut”). Nursery rhyme knowledge also predicts alliteration oddity task performance (e.g., identify the word containing the odd beginning sound It/ in the series “tap,” “had,” “hat”). Additional longitu- dinal research showed that the children’s performance on the rhyming and allitera- tion oddity tasks predicted their performance on measures of reading and spelling taken several years later (e.g., Bryant & Bradley 1983, 1985; MacLean, Bryant, & Bradley 1987; Bryant, Bradley, MacLean, & Crossland, 1989).

Furthermore, Bryant, MacLean, Bradley & Crossland (1990) have reported path analyses showing that rhyming and alliteration are related to reading indirectly through phoneme detection (measured by phoneme deletion and phoneme tapping tasks). They also showed that rhyming and alliteration, as well as phoneme detec- tion, are all directly related to reading. Bryant et al. (1990) suggest that rhyming and #alliteration influence reading because sequences of phonemes which begin or end .words tend to have spelling sequences in common. Goswami (1988, 1990) has shown that young children use these intrasyllabic regularities in orthography and phonology early in the acquisition of reading skill.

Bertelson, Morais and their co-workers, however, have reported evidence which challenges the unidirectional hypothesis. They have found that adult illiterates perform more poorly than ex-illiterates having the same social and economic background on tasks in which they are required to add, delete or reverse single phonemes in words (e.g., Morais, Cary, Alegria, Cyr Bertelson 1979; Content, Kolinsky, Morais & Bertelson 1986; Morais, Bertelson, Cary, & Alegria 1986; Morais, Alegria, & Content 1987). Furthermore, Bertelson & deGelder (1989) have argued

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that awareness that words rhyme tends to develop spontaneously and is not related to reading acquisition while awareness of individual phonemes is a product of reading instruction.

Consistent with this idea, Bertelson, deGelder, Tfouni & Morais (1989) found that illiterate subjects could perform rhyme judgment and vowel deletion tasks, but were unable to perform consonant deletion tasks. In addition, Read, Zhang, Nie & Ding (1986) have shown that phonological awareness is specific to an alphabetic orthography. They found that adult readers, who had learned to read Chinese characters using an alphabetic orthography (Hanyu pinyin), could add and delete individual consonants in spoken Chinese words. In contrast, adults with similar educational and social backgrounds, who had learned the characters without any alphabetic assistance, were unable to perform these phonological awareness tasks.

These data on adult illiterates suggest several conclusions. First, phonological awareness may not emerge naturally during the course of linguistic or cognitive biological maturation; instead, it may require specific instruction in literacy. Second, causation may be bi-directional and go from literacy to phonological awareness as well as from phonological awareness to literacy. Third, phonological awareness may not be a unitary, homogeneous skill. Instead, it may be heterogeneous with different forms of the skill being connected to different aspects of literacy. As a result, a global hypothesis about the relationship between phonological awareness and literacy may be less tenable than one in which the direction of causation is specified for different linguistic units (e.g., phonemes, onsets, rimes).

The research on illiterates indicates that knowing how to read will facilitate per- formance on at least some phonological awareness tasks. This conclusion also seems to apply to research with children. Wagner & Torgeson (1987) reanalyzed the longi- tudinal data reported by Lundberg, Olofsson & Wall (1980) and reported that the median correlation between phonological awareness measures taken in Kindergar- ten and grade one reading performance dropped from .45 to .06 when the children’s reading ability in Kindergarten was held constant. Valtin (1984) has made the same point in a similar analysis. In another longitudinal study, Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes (1987) found that children’s phoneme deletion performance increased as their reading skill increased whereas blending was not influenced by reading level.

Bradley & Bryant (1983, 1985) eliminated 20% of the initial sample of 503 four- and five year-old children in their longitudinal-training study because these children could read one or more words on the Schonell reading test. Nevertheless, the 403 remaining nonreaders were quite skilled at rhyme and alliteration oddity tasks. In addition, MacLean et. al. (1987) and Bryant et. al. (1989) have reported similar findings on rhyme and alliteration oddity tasks among children who could not yet read any words.

Finally, Kirtley et. al. (1989) found that non-readers in an oddity task could identify the word containing the odd single consonant phoneme above chance when the consonant was the onset (e.g., /p/ in “man,” “mint,” “peck,” “mug”). Performance was at chance, however, in identifying the word containing the odd consonant when the consonant was embedded in the rime (e.g., /t/ in “pin,” “gun,” “hat,” “men”). In contrast, children who had just begun to read were above chance in identifying the word containing the odd consonant when the consonant was the

PROTO-LITERACY AND PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS 247

onset and when it was embedded in the rime. These results suggest that awareness of individual phonemes requires literacy whereas awareness of onsets and rimes does not.

LETTER-SOUND ASSOCIATION MEASURES OF PROTO-LITERACY AND THE EMERGENCE OF PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

One problem, however, with the above conclusion about the relationships between literacy, level of linguistic units, and phonological awareness is the assumption that literacy only begins when children can accurately perform the difficult tasks of reading single words aloud or spelling them to dictation. A more comprehensive way to consider the relationships between phonological awareness and literacy is to look at children’s “literacy” before they can actually read or spell any words.

Literacy is an emergent phenomenon that begins before children receive instruc- tion in school. Adams (1990) estimates that activities such as being read to aloud, playing letter and word games, and watching Sesame Street provide many middle class children in North America with several thousand hours of exposure to printed words and their corresponding phonological representations before they are for- mally taught reading and spelling. In contrast, children who have had minimal interactions with print tend to have difficulty learning to read and spell (e.g., Clay 1976; Feitelson & Goldstein 1986; Heath 1983; Teale 1986).

Children who differ in their exposure to print are very likely to differ in their level of literacy before they enter school and begin to receive formal instruction in reading. This initial literacy or “proto-literacy” does not involve knowledge of how to read or spell any words, except possibly recognizing highly salient and familiar logos such as McDonald’s (e.g., Masonheimer, Drum & Ehri 1984). Instead, proto- literate knowledge involves associations that are learned between letters and their names (b-pronounced “bee”) and letters and their sounds (b-/b/ pronounced “buh”). These associations are often acquired informally during the preschool years through exposure to print and this knowledge may influence the acquisition of phonological awareness (and, ultimately, reading and spelling) even though the children are unable to read and spell whole words (Barron 1986; Ehri 1983, 1984).

Stuart & Coltheart (1988) and Vellutino & Scanlon (1987), for example, have reported correlations between letter-sound knowledge and measures of phonologi- cal awareness that range between .60 and .80 for five year-old children having only a few months of formal schooling. Correlations of a similar magnitude were also reported for letter-name knowledge. Read (1986) has shown that preschoolers use their knowledge of sound-letter and name-letter associations to construct invented spellings (e.g., spelling WTR for “water”) and Mann, Tobin & Wilson (1987) have shown that the phonetic accuracy of invented spellings was significantly correlated with a phoneme classification measure of phonological awareness.

Bradley & Bryant (1983, 1985) found that phonological awareness training which consisted of training letter-sound associations as well as sounds was more effective in producing gains in reading and spelling than training which consisted of the

248 LEARNING AND /ND/V/DUAL DIFFERENCES VOLUME 3, NUMBER 3.1991

sounds alone. The 65 children in Bradley & Bryant’s (1983,1985) training study were about six years old when they began their training and it continued for two years. Apparently, the children were quite familiar with the alphabet by the time the actual letter-sound association training was introduced so it is not possible to determine what effect, if any, prior letter-sound knowledge may have had upon their phono- logical awareness training or their acquisition of reading and spelling skill. Some investigators, however, have specifically assessed letter-sound knowledge in an effort to determine how this form of proto-literacy might influence phonological awareness and early reading. Four representative studies are described below.

The first study was reported by Ehri & Wilce (1985). These investigators identified three groups of five year-olds on the basis of their ability to read 40 words commonly found in children’ readers (e.g., up, go, book, school, see). The pre-readers could read two percent of the words, the novices could read 11 percent and the veterans could read 44 percent. All three groups knew at least 75 percent of their letter-name associations, but the pre-readers knew only 26 percent of the letter-sound associa- tions whereas the novices and the veterans knew 77 and 83 percent, respectively. The children learned to associate a spoken word (e.g., “scissors”) with a sequence of letters that was either graphically distinctive (e.g., qDjl<) or consisted of letter- sound associations that corresponded approximately to the sounds making up the word (e.g., szrs).

Ehri & Wilce (1985) found that the novices and veterans were better at learning the letter sequences whose sounds corresponded to the words whereas the pre-readers were better at learning the graphically distinctive letter sequences. Neither group was able to remember the graphically distinct sequences, but the novices and veter- ans were better at remembering the phonetically corresponding sequences. These results, particularly the performance of the novices, suggests that children who possess letter-sound knowledge can acquire and retain new orthographic represen- tations even when their knowledge of printed words is minimal.

The second study was reported by Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley (1989, 1990). They gave non-readers (three-five year olds) phonological awareness training which consisted of segmenting and identifying the onsets lmi and lsl in the spoken words “mat” and “sat.” The children were then taught to read mnt and sat. Finally, the children were required to transfer their knowledge of how to read mat and sat to the task of deciding that “mow” rather than “sow” was the correct pronunciation for the printed word mow.

Transfer was successful, however, only when the children had been taught the specific letter-sound associations between s-lsl and m-lmi as well as how to read mat and sat. These investigators argue that both phonological awareness and letter- sound knowledge are necessary for the acquisition of the alphabetic principle.

The effect of letter-sound knowledge on phonological awareness task performance was assessed by Hohn & Ehri (1983) in the third study. These investigators taught non-readers the names and sounds of eight letters. In subsequent phonological awareness training sessions, one group of children learned to segment words and nonwords by selecting the letter token that corresponded to each phoneme making up the items. A second group also used tokens to segment the phonemes, but these tokens did not have letters printed on them and they were not visually distinctive.

PROTO-LITERACY AND PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS 249

The letter trained group performed better than the no letter group on a post-test segmentation task employing the phonemes used during the original training. Both of the experimental groups were superior at post-test to a control group that did not receive any training. Hohn & Ehri”s (1983) results indicate that there is an advantage to teaching non-readers’ to segment words by identifying the letter-sound correspondences in the words. They show that this form of instruction produces greater improvements in phonological awareness than teaching segmentation by sounds alone.

The fourth study, reported by Barron, Golden, Seldon, Tait, Marmurek & Haines (1990), was a phonological awareness training experiment involving non-readers who differed in their letter-sound knowledge. The children were given a training task patterned after Bradley & Bryant’s (1983, 1985) phonological awareness oddity tasks. They heard three words (e.g., “cat,” “sat, ” “fit”) spoken by a DECtalk speech synthesizer (e.g., Olson, Foltz & Wise 1986). As each word was spoken, a white square appeared on a video monitor. As soon as all three words had been presented, the children used a light pen to point to the square (third square) that corresponded to the word (“fit”) containing the odd phoneme /ii. Immediately after the square was touched, DECtalk told the children whether or not their response was correct and then pronounced the correct word.

In one experimental condition, the children were given both spoken and printed feedback with the critical letter (i.e., i) highlighted in a different color. They were given only spoken feedback in a second experimental condition. The control condi- tion consisted of an oddity semantic classification task. The post-test was a phoneme deletion task (Bruce 1964) in which the children were required to delete a consonant phoneme from the initial consonant cluster onset of a word (e.g., say “stop” without the Is/).

Ban-on et. al. (1990) found that the children with high letter-sound knowledge in the spoken plus print feedback condition were the only group of subjects that were better than the control condition on the consonant deletion post-test task. Their results indicate that the combination of high letter-sound knowledge and specific feedback about letter-sound associations allows non-readers to increase their ability to detect phonemes in words.

In summary, these four studies suggest the possibility that knowing the associa- tions between letters and sounds may influence the acquisition of phonological awareness among non-readers as well as influence the acquisition of early reading and spelling skills.

RECONSIDERING THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND LITERACY

The evidence reviewed above suggests that current conceptions of the relationship between phonological awareness and literacy may require some revision. It is pos- sible that proto-literacy, in the form of letter-sound knowledge, may influence chilldren’s ability to attend to at least some of the sub-units within a syllable before

250 LEARNING AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES VOLUME 3. NUMBER 3.1991

they acquire the ability to read or spell any words. There are three potential candidate sub-units that may be influenced by proto-literacy: rimes, onsets and phonemes.

Rimes may be the first sub-syllabic unit of which children become aware. The emer- gence of rime awareness may not be completely spontaneous or natural, however, even though there is not any evidence indicating that it is influenced by proto-literacy or literacy. Bryant et. al. (1989) have shown that there is a relationship between knowledge of nursery rhymes and measures of phonological awareness taken over a year later even when differences in initial phonological skill are removed statisti- cally. These results suggest that the informal instruction in nursery rhymes given by parents and others provides children with some enduring knowledge about the segmental structure of syllables. This knowledge may increase their phonological sensitivity and, indirectly, influence their success in learning to read and spell.

The question of whether onsets are influenced by literacy appears to be an open question. Kirtley et. al. (1989) have shown that non-readers can delete single phoneme onsets but they cannot delete single phonemes that are embedded within rimes. Kirtley et. al.‘s (1989) subjects were five years, seven months of age and may have had substantial letter-sound association knowledge which could have influ- enced their ability to detect onsets.

Consistent with this possibility, Barron, Seldon, Golden, Marmurek & Haines (1991) found that measures of letter-sound association knowledge accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in the performance of 112 nonreaders and nonspellers on a phonological awareness task in which they were required to delete single consonant onsets from one syllable words. The children were virtually the same age (five years, six months) as the subjects in Kirtley et. al. (1989). These results were obtained after the variance associated with age, IQ., arithmetic skill, memory and rhyming had been removed statistically using fixed order regressions. They indicate that letter-sound knowledge measures of proto-literacy may influence onset detection among children who are not literate.

Although the evidence indicates that phoneme detection is influenced by literacy, the precise nature of that influence is unclear. Ehri, Wilce & Taylor (1987) have shown that orthography can influence the accuracy with which children classify vowels that have ambiguous pronunciations. Furthermore, Read (1986) has shown that children omit letters from their invented spellings that correspond to sounds that have relatively brief durations. The /n/ in bent, for example, is only about 30 milliseconds long and it is not separately articulated from the preceding vowel. This phoneme is considerably longer when it occurs in the final position in a word. Similarly, some vowels that appear before /r/ tend to have very short durations (e.g., “fir”).

These findings suggest the possibility that phonemes which are difficult to per- ceive in some contexts due to their duration, similarity to other phonemes, or not being separately articulated may also be very difficult to pay attention to as separate entities in phonological awareness tasks. As a result, it is possible that these phonemes may be more likely to be influenced by literacy than other phonemes.

In summary, this analysis of the relationships among literacy, rimes, onsets and phonemes is consistent with the idea that phonological awareness is a heterogeneous skill and that the direction of the relationship between phonological awareness and

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liter,acy depends upon the level of the linguistic unit being considered. The evidence suggests that rime, onset and phoneme awareness influence the acquisition of literacy, but that rime awareness is not influenced by literacy or proto-literacy. Rime awareness may, however, be influenced by informal instruction which emphasizes rime units (e.g., by learning nursery rhymes and playing rhyming games). Onset awareness may be influenced by proto-literacy, but not by literacy while phoneme awareness appears to be influenced by both proto-literacy and literacy.

CONCLUSIONS, IMPLICATIONS, AND POSSIBLE MECHANISMS FOR HOW LITERACY MIGHT INFLUENCE PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS

Considered together, the evidence indicates that phonological awareness is far from being a homogeneous skill that emerges naturally or spontaneously during the course of oral language development. Instead, it appears to be a heterogeneous skill that has a very complex and highly interactive relationship with literacy both in the form of letter-sound proto-literacy and in the form of whole word literacy.

The complex, interactive relationships between phonological awareness and liter- acy require some consideration of the mechanisms that might account for how knowledge of print influences awareness of speech. Ehri (e.g., 1984; Ehri & Wilce 198!5) has argued that letters function as symbols for sound. When letters become associated with phonemes and assume their symbolic function it is possible that the letter-sound unit provides a representation that is qualitatively different, and moire accessible in phonological awareness tasks, than the representation of the phoneme alone.

Within the general framework of connectionist models of word recognition (e.g., Seidenberg & McClelland 1989), this idea might be translated into the notion that the formation of a letter-sound association allows a letter (or grapheme) to activate its corresponding phoneme when the letter is presented, and a phoneme to activate its corresponding letter or grapheme when the phoneme is presented. It is possible that, with practice, this pattern of reciprocal activation would increase the strength of the connections between the letter and the phoneme. The result might be a representation (i.e., pattern of activation) corresponding to the phoneme that in- cluded the letter with which it is associated.

Obviously, the complexity of this theoretical mechanism would be increased when consideration is given to the constraints associated with word context and the fact that some phonemes correspond to more than one letter and some letters correspond to more than one phoneme (e.g., the letters th can correspond to a single phoneme and the letters a and e can each correspond to more than one phoneme). Neverthe- less, it may still be possible to maintain the basic idea that phonemes activate letters and that the resulting representations would make the phonemes more accessible within the context of the specific attentional requirements of phonological awareness tasks.

There is evidence that is consistent with the idea that information about print is activated when subjects process spoken words. Seidenberg & Tanenhaus (1979)

252 LEARNlNG AND INDIWIDUAL DFFERENCES VOLUME 3. NUMBER 3,1991

have shown that spelling influences adults’ judgments of pairs of auditorially pre- sented word pairs that rhyme or do not rhyme. Subjects made faster responses to pairs like “dune” and “tune,” which have similarly spelled rimes, than to pairs like “glue” and “crew” which have rimes that are not spelled the same. Subjects made slower responses to pairs like “foot” and “toot,” which have similarly spelled rimes but different pronunciations, than to pairs like “gown” and “moan” in which the rimes were spelled differently.

Pearson & Barron (1989) have obtained this auditory-orthographic activation effect with beginning readers in grades one and two even when the second item in the word pairs was a picture rather than a spoken word (e.g., the spoken word “dune” followed by a picture of a moon). Using a picture eliminates any physical-acoustic differences among the initial phonemes in the words that might influence the acti- vation of the response timing apparatus. Finally, Tumner & Nesdale (1982) found that beginning readers’ phonological awareness performance in a phoneme tapping task was influenced by spelling. The children responded on the basis on the number of letters in a word rather than the number of phonemes even though they were not shown the word’s spelling (e.g., four rather than three taps were given to items like “them” and “theb”).

These theoretical considerations and the supporting evidence suggest the possi- bility that the formation of letter-sound associations results in representations that may be more accessible in phonological awareness tasks than representations of speech sounds alone. Ehri et. al. (1987) take this conclusion one step further by suggesting that true phonemic awareness may not facilitate the acquisition of liter- acy. Instead, phonemic awareness should be trained in order to maximize the fit with the orthographic system, even if it means “fictionalizing” the linguistic structure by training children to attend to phonemes that have minimal acoustic information, but are represented in the spelling of the word (e.g., training children to attend to the /m/ in “bump” as a separate sound even though it is actually part of a nasalized vowel, is not separately articulated, and has a very short duration). Perhaps giving pre-readers instruction in proto-literacy by teaching letter-sound associations di- rectly is a first step towards achieving that goal (e.g., Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley 1989, 1990; Hohn & Ehri 1983).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The writing of this article was supported by an operating grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank Virginia Berninger and Linnea Ehri for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

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