Phonological awareness refers to a set of skills necessary to recognize and manipulate the sounds that make up words in a given language, such as syllables, rhymes and phonemes (Anthony & Francis, 2005; Cunningham & Carroll, 2015). Phonological awareness is critical in learning to read, as children who develop the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds of words are better able to couple the sounds of phonemes with their respective written symbols (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Goswami, 1990). It appears that children who can identify similarities and differences among sounds at the beginning, middle and end of words are more likely to notice how these sounds relate to their orthographic representations. For example, a child who understands that “pat” and “pen” begin with the same sound or that “mat” and “hat” share the same ending should have less difficulty understanding that these words share the same spelling patterns (Goswami, 1990). Indeed, a number of studies have demonstrated that phonological awareness can be a strong predictor of reading skills (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Cunningham & Carroll, 2015; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987) and poor readers typically exhibit difficulties in the perception of rhyme and alliteration (Bradley & Bryant, 1978).
Gombert (1992) reports two types of phonological awareness, implicit or epilinguistic and explicit or metalinguistic awareness. The former refers to a general sensitivity to similarities and differences between speech sounds and develops during the preschool years before reading acquisition, whereas the latter refers to consciously perceiving and manipulating phonemes within words, and develops during the early school years when the child learns to read. Both these skills can be encompassed within the term phonological sensitivity, which refers to the ability of both perceiving and manipulating sound units (Anthony et al., 2003). In a longitudinal study with 288 children followed from kindergarten to second grade of elementary school, phonological sensitivity exhibited the strongest link to literacy acquisition (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1994). According to other researchers, phonological awareness might also involve other sets of skills such as phonological naming, or phonological short-term memory (Whitehurst, & Lonigan, 2001). Phonological naming refers to the ability to access phonological information from long-term memory (e.g., quickly retrieving the names of objects) (Wagner et al., 1993; Whitehurst, & Lonigan, 2001) while phonological short-term memory is linked to the recall of sequences of words or speech sounds (Wagner et al., 1993; Baddeley, 1992). Consistent with the idea that
phonological awareness consists of a number of phonological skills, studies using large samples and advanced statistical methods such as confirmatory factor analysis and/or structural equation modelling, have repeatedly demonstrated that phonological awareness is a construct that can be expressed behaviourally in a number of skills (Anthony et al., 2002; Anthony & Lonigan, 2004; Schatschneider et al., 1999; as reviewed in Antony & Francis, 2005) and that may follow different developmental rates (Wagner et al., 1994). Furthermore, phonological awareness manifests striking stability overtime and across its different component abilities (Anthony & Lonigan, 2004; Wagner et al., 1994).
According to the prevailing account regarding the development of phonological sensitivity, children become more sensitive to increasingly smaller sounds units within a word (Anthony et al., 2003; Anthony & Francis, 2005; Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). Therefore, children gradually become competent at perceiving and/or manipulating syllables, then onsets and rhymes and finally individual phonemes. In a grand scale study, Anthony et al. (2003) investigated the developmental trajectory of phonological awareness skill acquisition in a sample of 947 participants between the ages of 2 and 6 years. They examined phonological perception and manipulation (i.e., the ability of children to detect blending and omission as well as to blend and omit sound units) at four levels of complexity, namely word, syllable, onset/rhyme and phoneme. Results revealed stable patterns in the order of acquisition of these skills after task complexity had been controlled for: children gradually progressed from mastering word-level skills, to mastering phoneme-level skills. Furthermore, rather than pointing to a rigid progression of developmental stages, children appeared to refine phonological awareness skills in parallel to acquiring new ones (Anthony et al., 2003). These findings were corroborated by another study by Ziegler and Goswami (2005), who extended the progression from large sound units to smaller ones, and in languages other than English (e.g., Turkish, Italian, Greek, French and English).
Carroll, Snowling and Stevenson (2003) tested an alternative trajectory of phonological acquisition broadly based on Gombert’s (1992) theory of epilinguistic (global awareness of similarities in speech sounds) and metalinguistic (manipulation of speech sounds) phonological awareness. According to their account, children’s understanding of phonological information might progress from a global sensitivity to large units within a word (i.e., syllables and rhymes) to awareness and explicit manipulation of smaller sound units (i.e., phonemes). Carroll et al. (2003) tested this
hypothesis by administering a series of phonological tasks to a sample of 3-year-old children at three time points. Their sample was considerably smaller (N = 67) than the Anthony et al. (2003) study, however the fact that they used a longitudinal design constituted an advantage. Their results were in line with their hypothesis, in that performance between syllable and rhyme awareness did not differ at any point of the assessment, whereas phoneme awareness appeared to emerge at the last stage. Their findings came into contrast with other researchers’ conclusions (Anthony et al. 2003; Treiman, & Zukowski, 1991; Ziegler & Goswami, 2005) about a progression from syllable awareness, to onset/rhyme and finally to phoneme awareness, although Anthony et al., (2003) did concede that there may be overlap in the stages of phonological awareness acquisition.
Irrespective of the the precise developmental progression of phonological understanding, a considerable body of research agrees that phonological sensitivity in the preschool years emerges as one of the strongest predictors of learning to read and that overall, young children appear to pay attention to larger sound units such as syllables and rhymes earlier than phonemes. Furthermore, a finding with important implications for the present research is that 3- and 4-year-old children already show awareness of differences and similarities between the sounds of words at the syllable- and onset/rhyme level (Antony et al., 2003; Bradley & Bryant, 1978). Drawing from this body of research, the design of this research project (Study 1) focused on the assessment of phonological sensitivity skills that have previously been tested in 3- and 4-year-old children (e.g., Anthony et al., 2003; Bradley & Bryant, 1978; Carroll et al., 2003), namely, word and syllable blending and segmentation (detection and manipulation at the word and syllable level) and rhyme and alliteration detection (awareness of the onset/rhyme level).