Phonological awareness is an important precursor in learning to read. This awareness of phonemes fosters a child's ability to hear and blend sounds, encode and decode words, and to spell phonetically. This quantitative study assessed pre-K children's existing Euro-American nursery rhyme knowledge and phonological awareness literacy, provided…

Reports on longitudinal data from a group of three- to six-year-olds (N=64) that supports a hypothesis that acquaintance with nursery rhymes positively affects children's reading ability. Data showed a strong relation between early knowledge of nursery rhymes and success in reading and spelling, despite differences in social background,…