To test how phonemic awareness influences reading, two experiments were conducted in the northwestern part of England in which twenty pairs of children possessing phonemic awareness (pa+) and lacking phonemic awareness (pa-) and matched for reading and chronological age were compared. In the first experiment, the subjects' ability to detect changes in the graphemic structure of isolated words was assessed. In the second experiment, the subjects' reading from their schoolbooks was examined by miscue analysis. In comparison with the pa- group, the pa+ group was significantly more sensitive to changes in grapheme structure and made greater use of graphemic cues and made fewer "nonsense" errors in "normal" reading. (Author/DF)