Elaborates the view that phonological recoding, or print-to-sound translation, is a self-teaching mechanism enabling learners to acquire the orthographic representations necessary for visual word recognition. Discusses developmental properties of phonological recoding, reviews evidence on the importance of cognitive abilities underlying the…

Two studies investigated whether knowledge of specific letter-sound correspondences is a necessary precursor of children's ability to isolate phonemes in speech. In both studies, Czech and English children reliably isolated phonemes for which they did not know the corresponding letter. These data refute the idea that phoneme manipulation ability…

Vocabulary growth was suggested to prompt the implementation of increasingly finer-grained lexical representations of spoken words in children (e.g., [Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). "Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading…

Twenty-four deaf and 24 hearing children were asked to locate three target letters (c,g, and h) in prose. Target letters were either phonemically modal (pronounced, as g in badge) or nonmodal (silent, as g in rough). Hearing children, as expected, detected significantly more modal than nonmodal forms, while deaf children detected the same number…

Examined the relationship between phonological awareness and reading skills in eight-year olds from Britain, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Found that performance of Chinese children on phonological tests was not significantly related to their reading ability, in contrast to performance of English children, whose results continued to show a significant…