Previous research on age and schooling effects is largely restricted to studies of children who begin formal schooling at 6 years of age, and the measures of phoneme awareness used have typically lacked sensitivity for beginning readers. Our study addresses these issues by testing 4 to 6 year-olds (first 2 years of formal schooling in the United…

Castles and Coltheart (2004) argued that the causal link between children's underlying phonological awareness and success in learning to read remains unproven. We argue that the balance of evidence does favor such a causal link. We also argue, however, that learning to read depends on broader language skills and that, like other aspects of…