Phonological awareness (PA), phonological memory (PM), and phonological access to lexical storage (also known as RAN), play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPAs) in 147 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children whose native language was…

Significant controversy exists about the nature of phonological awareness, a causal variable in reading acquisition. In 4 studies that included 202 5- to 6-year-old children studied longitudinally for 3 years, 123 2- to 5-year-old children, 38 4-year-old children studied longitudinally for 2 years, and 826 4- to 7-year-old children, the authors…

This study examined relations among sensitivity to words, syllables, rhymes, and phonemes in older and younger preschoolers. Confirmatory factor analyses found that a one-factor model best explained the date from both groups of children. Only variance common to all phonological sensitivity skills was related to print knowledge and rudimentary…