Phonological Awareness and Literacy

Phonological Awareness and Literacy 489 Storm J (1892). Englische philologie die lebende Sprache 1 Abteilung: Phonetik und Aussprache (2nd edn.) (vol. 1). Leipzig: Reisland. Techmer F (1890). ‘Beitrag zur Geschichte der franzo¨sischen und englishchen Phonetik und Phonographie.’ IZ fu¨r allgemeine Sprachwissenschafr 5, 145–295.

Ungeheuer G (1962). Elemente einer akustischen theorie der Vokalartikulation. Berlin: Springer. Vie¨tor W (1898). Elemente der phonetik (4th edn.). Leipzig: O. R. Reisland.

Phonological Awareness and Literacy U Goswami, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

There is growing empirical evidence from a variety of languages for a causal connection between phonological awareness and literacy development. Phonological awareness is usually defined as the child’s ability to detect and manipulate component sounds in words. Component sounds can be defined at a number of different linguistic levels, for example syllables versus rhymes. As children acquire language, they become aware of the sound patterning characteristic of their language, and use similarities and differences in this sound patterning as one means of organizing the mental lexicon (see Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). In describing how phonological awareness is related to literacy, I will discuss three kinds of empirical data: (a) developmental studies measuring children’s phonological skills in different languages; (b) developmental studies measuring longitudinal connections between phonology and reading in different languages, and (c) studies seeking to test whether the connection between phonological awareness and literacy is causal (via training phonological skills). I will argue that the development of reading is founded in phonological processing across languages. However, as languages vary in their phonological structure and also in the consistency with which phonology is represented in orthography, cross-language differences in the development of certain aspects of phonological awareness and in the development of phonological recoding strategies should be expected across orthographies. After discussing the empirical evidence, I will conclude by showing that data from different languages can be described theoretically by a Psycholinguistic Grain Size theory of reading, phonology, and development (Goswami et al., 2001, 2003; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). According to this theory, while the sequence of phonological development may be language universal, the ways in which sounds are mapped to letters (or other orthographic symbols) may be language-specific. In particular, solutions to

the ‘mapping problem’ of how sounds are related to symbols appear to differ with orthographic consistency. When orthographies allow 1:1 mappings between symbols and sounds (e.g., Spanish, a transparent or consistent orthography), children learn to read relatively quickly. When orthographies have a many:1 mapping between sound and symbol (feedback inconsistency, which is very characteristic of French, as in pain/fin/hein/) or between symbol and sound (feedforward inconsistency, very characteristic of English, e.g. cough/rough/bough), children learn to read more slowly. French and English are examples of nontransparent or inconsistent orthographies. My basic argument throughout this article will be that the linguistic relativity of phonological and orthographic structures is central to understanding the development of phonological awareness and reading.

Phonological Awareness in Different Languages According to hierarchical theories of syllable structure (see Treiman, 1988), there are at least three linguistic levels at which phonological awareness can be measured. Children can become aware that (a) words can be broken down into syllables (e.g., two syllables in wigwam, three syllables in butterfly); (b) syllables can be broken down into onset/rime units: to divide a syllable into onset and rime, divide at the vowel, as in t-eam, dr-eam, str-eam (The term ‘rime’ is used because words with more than one syllable have more than one rime, for example, in captain and chaplain, the rimes are -ap and -ain, respectively. The rimes are identical, but these words would not conventionally be considered to rhyme, because they do not share identical phonology after the first onset, as do rabbit and habit, for example; this shared portion is sometimes called the ‘superrime.’); and (c) onsets and rimes can be broken down into sequences of phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest speech sounds making up words, and in the reading literature are usually defined in terms of alphabetic letters. Linguistically, phonemes are a relatively abstract concept defined

490 Phonological Awareness and Literacy

in terms of sound substitutions that change meaning. For example, pill and pit differ in terms of their final phoneme, and pill and pal differ in terms of their medial phoneme. The mechanism for learning about phonemes seems to be learning about letters. Letters are used to symbolize phonemes, even though the physical sounds corresponding (for example) to the ‘P’ in pit, lap, and spoon are rather different. In all languages studied to date, phonemic awareness appears to emerge as a consequence of being taught to read and write. In general, prereading children and illiterate adults perform poorly in tasks requiring them to manipulate or to detect single phonemes (e.g., Goswami and Bryant, 1990; Morais et al., 1979). Studies of the development of phonological awareness across languages suggest, perhaps surprisingly, that the early emergence of phonological awareness at the level of syllables and onset-rimes is fairly universal. Children in all languages so far studied show above-chance performance in phonological awareness tasks at the syllable and onset/rime level long before they go to school. Cross-language studies do not show uniform patterns of development for phoneme awareness, however. Phoneme awareness develops rapidly in some languages once schooling commences, but not in others. Children learning transparent orthographies such as Greek, Finnish, German, and Italian acquire phonemic awareness relatively quickly. Children learning nontransparent orthographies such as English, Danish, and French are much slower to acquire phonemic awareness. The development of phonological awareness in children can be measured using a variety of tasks. For example, children may be asked to monitor and correct speech errors (e.g., sie to pie), to select the odd word out in terms of sound (e.g., which word does not rhyme: pin, win, sit), to make a judgment about sound similarity (e.g., do these two words share a syllable? hammer, hammock), to segment words by tapping with a stick (e.g., tap out the component sounds in soap ¼ three taps), and to blend sounds into words (e.g., d-ish, or d-i-sh to make dish; see for example, Bradley and Bryant, 1983; Chaney, 1992; Liberman et al., 1974; Metsala, 1999; Treiman and Zukowski, 1991). However, as well as measuring different levels of phonological awareness, these tasks also make differing cognitive demands on young children. In order to investigate the sequence of the development of phonological awareness, ideally the cognitive demands of a particular task should be equated across linguistic level. This is even more important to achieve when comparing the development of phonological awareness across different languages.

Figure 1 Psycholinguistic units in words according to hierarchical theories of syllable structure.

Unfortunately, it is rare to find research papers in which the same task has been used to study the emergence of phonological awareness at the different linguistic levels of syllable, rhyme, and phoneme. The most comprehensive studies in English are those recently conducted by Anthony and his colleagues (Anthony et al., 2002, 2003; Anthony and Lonigan, 2004). For example, Anthony et al. (2003) used blending and deletion tasks at the word, syllable, onset/rime, and phoneme level. They also studied a large group of children (more than 1,000 children) and included a much wider age range than many studies (2–6 years). Using sophisticated statistical techniques including hierarchical loglinear analyses, and a factorial design that allowed them to investigate the order of acquisition of phonological skills, they showed that children’s progressive awareness of linguistic units followed the hierarchical model of word structure shown in Figure 1. Children generally mastered word-level skills before they mastered syllable-level skills, they mastered syllable-level skills before onset/rime skills, and they mastered onset/rimelevel skills before phoneme skills. These findings with respect to sequence are mirrored by many other studies conducted in English using a variety of tasks to measure awareness of syllables, onsets, rimes, and phonemes. For example, counting tasks (in which children tap with a stick or put out counters to represent the number of syllables or phonemes in a word) and oddity tasks (in which children select the odd word out in terms of either onset/rimes or phonemes) have yielded a similar developmental picture (e.g., Goswami and East, 2000; Liberman et al., 1974; Perfetti et al., 1987; Tunmer and Nesdale, 1985). Counting and oddity tasks are useful for comparisons across languages, as both tasks have been used by researchers in other languages to measure syllable, onset/rime, and phoneme skills. Relevant data for syllable and onset/rime awareness are shown in Table 1. It appears that, where comparisons are possible, preschoolers in all languages so far studied have good phonological awareness at the large-unit level of syllables, onsets, and rimes. For large units, phonological awareness appears to emerge as a natural consequence of

Phonological Awareness and Literacy 491 Table 1 Data (% correct) from studies comparing syllable (counting task) and rhyme awareness (oddity task) in different languages Language

Syllable

Rhyme

Greeka Turkishb Norwegianc Germand Frenche Englishf Chineseg

98 94 83 81 73 90 –

90 – 91h 73i – 71j 68

a

Porpodas, 1999. Durgunoglu and Oney, 1999. c Hoien et al., 1995. d Wimmer et al., 1991. e Demont and Gombert, 1996. f Liberman et al., 1974. g Ho and Bryant, 1997. h rhyme matching task. i Wimmer et al., 1994. j Bradley and Bryant, 1983.

Table 2 Data (% correct) from studies comparing phoneme counting in different languages in kindergarten or early Grade 1 Language

% Phonemes counted correctly

Greeka Turkishb Italianc Norwegiand Germane Frenchf Englishg Englishh Englishi

98 94 97 83 81 73 70 71 65

b

language acquisition. This is presumably because of speech-perceptual factors that are common across all languages using the syllable as the primary unit of phonology (see Richardson et al., 2004; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005, for relevant discussion). As noted above, phoneme awareness is heavily dependent on letter learning. Awareness of phonemes usually emerges fairly rapidly in languages with consistent orthographies, and in languages with simple syllable structure (languages based on consonant– vowel (CV) syllables. In these languages, such as Italian and Spanish, onset/rime segmentation (available prior to literacy) is equivalent to phonemic segmentation (theoretically learned via literacy) for many words (e.g., casa, mama). In Spanish and Italian, one letter consistently maps to one phoneme. Many of those phonemes are already represented in the spoken lexicon of word forms, because they are onsets and rimes (e.g., for a word like casa, the onset/ rimes are /c/ /A/ /s/ /A/ and so are the phonemes). Children learning to read consistent alphabetic orthographies with a simple syllable structure are best placed to solve the mapping problem of mapping units of print (letters) to units of sound (phonemes). Children learning languages with more complex syllable structures, such as German, face a more difficult mapping problem. In such languages, onset/rime segmentation is not usually equivalent to phonemic segmentation for most words. This is because most words either have codas (consonant phonemes) after the vowel (e.g., Hand) or complex (consonant cluster) onsets (e.g., Pflaum [plum]). However, for languages like German, the orthography is consistent: one letter

a

Harris and Giannoulis, 1999. Durgunoglu and Oney, 1999. c Cossu et al., 1988. d Hoien et al., 1995. e Wimmer et al., 1991. f Demont and Gombert, 1996. g Liberman et al., 1974. h Tunmer and Nesdale, 1985. i Perfetti et al., 1987 and Grade 2 children. b

does map to one and only one phoneme. Hence letters are a consistent clue to phonemes. The German child is still at an advantage in terms of developing phoneme awareness. The child faced with the most difficult mapping problem in initial reading is the child learning to read an orthographically inconsistent language that also has a complex syllable structure. Examples include English, French, Danish, and Portuguese. For English, onset/rime segmentation is rarely equivalent to phonemic segmentation. English has a relatively large number of monosyllables (around 4000), and of these only about 4.5% have a CV structure (see De Cara and Goswami, 2002). One letter does not consistently map to one phoneme for reading; instead one letter may map to as many as five or more phonemes (e.g., the letter A). Accordingly, phonemic awareness develops relatively slowly in English-speaking children. This is illustrated by the phoneme counting studies carried out in different languages summarized in Table 2. The development of phoneme awareness in different languages is mirrored by the ease of acquiring grapheme–phoneme recoding skills, termed the sine qua non of reading acquisition by Share (1995). As pointed out by Share and many others, phonological recoding (recoding letters into sounds) functions as a self-teaching device, allowing the child successfully to recode words that they have heard but never seen before (see also Ehri, 1992). As may be expected given the preceding analysis, grapheme–phoneme recoding skills develop relatively rapidly in consistent orthographies, and relatively slowly in inconsistent

492 Phonological Awareness and Literacy Table 3 Data (% correct) from the COST A8 study of grapheme– phoneme recoding skills for monosyllables in 14 European languages (adapted from Seymour et al., 2003) Language

Familiar real words

Nonwords

Greek Finnish German Austrian German Italian Spanish Swedish Dutch Icelandic Norwegian French Portuguese Danish Scottish English

98 98 98 97 95 95 95 95 94 92 79 73 71 34

97 98 98 97 92 93 91 90 91 93 88 76 63 41

orthographies. This is shown most clearly by a recent study comparing grapheme–phoneme recoding skills during the first year of schooling in the countries making up the European Community (EC) at the time that the data were gathered (Seymour et al., 2003). The children in the study received simple words and nonwords to recode, matched for familiarity as far as possible across orthography. Although the age of school entry varies across the EC, the success rates achieved by children in the different countries appear very closely tied to the transparency and phonological structure of the different languages. Children learning to read consistent languages with simple syllable structures (e.g., Finnish, Italian) were close to ceiling in grapheme–phoneme recoding ability. Children learning to read inconsistent languages with complex syllable structures (e.g., Danish, French, English) were not. The data from this study are reproduced in Table 3. Developmental studies measuring children’s phonological awareness in different languages allow some simple conclusions. The awareness of syllables, onsets, and rimes appears to emerge as a natural consequence of language acquisition in typically developing children across languages (note: this is not so for dyslexic children, see Developmental Dyslexia and Dysgraphia). Awareness of these large units of phonology is present by the age of around 3–4 years, long before children go to school and begin being taught to read. The awareness of phonemes does not appear to emerge as a natural consequence of language acquisition. Rather, it is an effortful consequence of reading acquisition. The rate of development of phonemic awareness varies systematically with the phonological structure of the language being learned and its orthographic consistency.

Longitudinal Associations between Phonological Awareness and Reading Across Languages The existence of a longitudinal connection between individual differences in children’s phonological awareness measured prior to schooling and their later progress in reading and spelling has been known for at least 20 years. In a seminal study in English, Bradley and Bryant (1983) demonstrated the importance of onset/rime awareness for subsequent reading development using the oddity task (e.g., which word does not rhyme: pin, win, sit). Bradley and Bryant gave oddity tasks to 400 preschoolers and found that onset/rime awareness was a significant predictor of their progress in reading and spelling measured at 8 and 9 years. This longitudinal correlation remained significant even when other factors such as IQ and memory were controlled in multiple regression equations. Subsequently, Maclean et al. (1987) reported a significant connection between rhyming skills at age 3 measured via nursery rhyme knowledge and single word reading at 4 years and 6 months. Following up Maclean et al.’s sample 2 years later, Bryant et al. (1990) reported a significant relationship between nursery rhyme knowledge at age 3 and success in reading and spelling at ages 5 and 6, even after factors such as social background and IQ were controlled. These findings for English have been replicated by a number of other research groups. For example, Burgess and Lonigan (1998) found that phonological sensitivity measured in a large sample of 115 4- and 5-year-old children (measured by the oddity task and tasks requiring children to blend and segment compound words into words or syllables) predicted performance in both letter-name and letter-sound knowledge tasks 1 year later (called rudimentary reading skills by the authors). Cronin and Carver (1998) used an onset oddity task and a rhyme matching task to measure phonological sensitivity in a group of 57 5-year-olds and found that phonological sensitivity significantly discriminated the three different achievement levels used to group the children in terms of reading ability at the end of first grade, even when vocabulary levels were controlled. Baker et al. (1998) showed that kindergarten nursery rhyme knowledge was the strongest predictor of word attack and word identification skills measured in grade 2, accounting for 36% and 48% of the variance, respectively. The second strongest predictor was letter knowledge, which accounted for an additional 11% and 18% of the variance, respectively. Note that these studies of preschoolers do not typically use phonemic measures of phonological awareness. This is because phonemic

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awareness is so difficult to measure in prereaders, unless it is awareness of onsets. Studies in other languages support the research findings typical of English, with some variation. A German study using the oddity task tested children (n ¼ 183) in their first month of schooling, when they were aged on average 6 years 11 months (Wimmer et al., 1994). Follow-up measures of reading and spelling were taken both 1 year later and 3 years later. Wimmer et al. (1994) found that performance in the oddity task was only minimally related to reading and spelling progress in German children when they were 7–8 years old (the same age as the children in Bradley and Bryant’s study). However, significant predictive relationships were found in the 3-year follow-up, when the children were aged on average 9 years 9 months. At this point, rime awareness (although not onset awareness) was significantly related to both reading and spelling development. A large-scale longitudinal study carried out by Lundberg et al. (1980) with 143 Swedish kindergartners found an earlier connection. They gave a number of phonological awareness tests, including rhyme production, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme reversal to the children in kindergarten, and examined the predictive relationships between these tests and reading attainment in second grade. Both the rhyme test and the phoneme tests were significant predictors of reading almost 2 years later. A study in Norwegian found a similar pattern of results. Hoien et al. (1995) reported that syllable, rhyme, and phoneme awareness all made independent contributions to variance in reading in a large group of 15,000 children. Finally, recent studies of Chinese children also report longitudinal relationships between phonological awareness and reading, even though Chinese children are learning a character-based rather than an alphabetic orthography. For example, Ho and Bryant (1997) gave a rime oddity task to 100 Chinese preschoolers aged on average 3 years 11 months. Performance was impressive, at 68% correct, and significantly predicted progress in reading and spelling 2 years later, even after factors such as age, IQ, and mother’s educational level had been controlled. This study demonstrates that the predictive relationships between large units and reading are found for nonalphabetic orthographies, too.

Are Longitudinal Associations Evidence for Causal Connections? Although the predictive relations found between early phonological awareness and later reading and spelling development are impressive, they do not necessarily mean that the connection is a causal one.

Even though most of the studies described above controlled for other variables such as IQ when computing longitudinal relationships, in order to demonstrate a causal connection it is necessary to intervene directly. For example, if early phonological awareness has a direct effect on how well a child learns to read and spell, then guiding children to discover and attend to the phonological structure of language should have a measurable impact on their reading progress. A number of studies have used research designs that included direct intervention. For example, as part of the longitudinal study discussed earlier, Bradley and Bryant (1983) took the 60 children in their cohort of 400 who had performed most poorly in the oddity task at 4 and 5 years of age, and gave some of them 2 years of training in grouping words on the basis of sounds using a picture-sorting task. The children were taught to group words by onset, rhyme, vowel, and coda phonemes (for example, placing pictures of a hat, a rat, a mat, and a bat together for grouping by rhyme). A control group learned to sort the same pictures by semantic category (e.g., farmyard animals). Half of the experimental group also spent the 2nd year of the study matching plastic letters to the shared phonological segments in words like hat, rat, and mat. Following the intervention, the children in the experimental group who had had plastic letter training were 8 months further on in reading than the children in the semantic control group, and 12 months further on in spelling, even after adjusting post-test scores for age and IQ. Compared to the children who had spent the intervening period in an unseen control group, they were an astonishing 24 months further on in spelling and 12 months in reading. Similar results were found in a large study of 235 Danish preschool children conducted by Lundberg et al. (1988). Their training was much more intensive than in the English study, and involved daily metalinguistic games and exercises, such as clapping out the syllables in words and attending to the first sounds in the children’s names. Training was for a period of 8 months and was aimed at guiding the children to ‘discover and attend to the phonological structure of language’ (Lundberg et al., 1988: 268). The effectiveness of the program was measured by comparing the children’s performance in various metalinguistic tasks after training to that of 155 children in an unseen control group. The trained children were found to be significantly ahead of the control children in a variety of metalinguistic skills including rhyming, syllable manipulation, and phoneme segmentation. The long-term effect of the training on the children’s reading and spelling progress in grades 1 and 2 was also assessed. The impact of the training was found to

494 Phonological Awareness and Literacy

be significant at both grades, for both reading and spelling, although effects were stronger for spelling. Two training studies conducted in German found a similar pattern of results to those reported by Lundberg et al. (1988). Schneider et al. (1997) developed a 6-month metalinguistic training program covering syllables, rhymes, and phonemes and gave this to a sample of 180 kindergarten children. Reading and spelling progress was measured in grades 1 and 2. Schneider et al. found significant effects of the metalinguistic training program on metalinguistic skills in comparison to an unseen control group, as would be expected from Lundberg et al.’s (1988) results. They also found significant long-term effects of metalinguistic training on reading and spelling progress, with stronger effects for spelling. In a second study, the same research group found significant effects of the same training program on the reading and spelling progress of 138 German children assessed as being at risk for dyslexia in kindergarten (Schneider et al., 2000). Prior to training, the at-risk children were significantly poorer at rhyme production, rhyme matching, and syllable segmentation than German control kindergartners, who were not thought to be at risk. This study used a nice research design in which all children designated at risk received training (either metalinguistic training alone, lettersound training alone, or both together). Their progress was then compared to that of children from the same kindergartens who had never been at risk. The researchers found that the at-risk children who had received the combined training program were not significantly different in literacy attainment a year into first grade when compared to those children who had never been at risk and who had received no kindergarten training. Interestingly, the at-risk group who received letter-sound training alone, without metalinguistic training, either performed at comparable levels in later reading and spelling progress to the metalinguistic training alone group, or performed at lower levels than this group. Both groups were still significantly impaired in literacy attainment in comparison to those children who had never been at risk. This suggests that training either phonological awareness alone or training letter-sound recoding alone is insufficient. Both skills are important for early literacy acquisition, at least for children thought to be at risk of reading failure. Training one set of skills without the other will not prevent literacy difficulties.

A Psycholinguistic Grain Size Model of Phonological Awareness and Literacy As shown by the studies reviewed above, the development of reading and spelling depends on phonological

awareness across all languages so far studied. Although apparently universal, specific characteristics of this developmental relationship appear to vary with language. Of course, languages vary in the nature of their phonological structure, and also in the consistency with which phonology is represented by orthography. This variation means that there are predictable developmental differences in the ease with which phonological awareness at different ‘grain sizes’ emerges across orthography (and also in the grain size of lexical representations and developmental reading strategies across orthographies; see Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). According to psycholinguistic grain size theory, beginning readers are faced with three problems: availability, consistency, and granularity of symbolto-sound mappings. The availability problem reflects the fact that not all phonological units are accessible prior to reading. Most of the research discussed in this article has been related to the availability problem. Prior to reading, the main phonological units of which children are aware are large units: syllables, onsets, and rimes. In alphabetic orthographies, the units of print available are single letters, which correspond to phonemes, units not yet represented in an accessible way by the child. Thus, connecting orthographic units to phonological units that are not yet readily available requires further cognitive development. The rapidity with which phonemic awareness is acquired seems to vary systematically with orthographic consistency (see Table 2). The consistency problem reflects the fact that some orthographic units have multiple pronunciations and that some phonological units have multiple spellings (as discussed above, both feedforward and feedback consistency are important; see Ziegler et al., 1997). Psycholinguistic grain size theory assumes that both types of inconsistency slow reading development. Importantly, the degree of inconsistency varies both between languages and for different types of orthographic units. For example, English has an unusually high degree of feedforward inconsistency at the rime level (from spelling to sound), whereas French has a high degree of feedback inconsistency (from sound to spelling; most languages have some degree of feedback inconsistency). This cross-language variation makes it likely a priori that there will be differences in reading development across languages, and indeed there are (see Table 3, and Ziegler and Goswami, 2005, for a more comprehensive discussion). Finally, the granularity problem reflects the fact that there are many more orthographic units to learn when access to the phonological system is based on bigger grain sizes as opposed to smaller grain sizes. That is, there are more words than there are syllables, more

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syllables than there are rimes, more rimes than there are graphemes, and more graphemes than there are letters. Psycholinguistic grain size theory argues that reading proficiency depends on the resolution of these three problems, which will of necessity vary by orthography. For example, children learning to read English must develop multiple strategies in parallel in order to become successful readers. They need to develop whole word recognition strategies and rhyme analogy strategies (beak-peak, Goswami, 1986) in addition to grapheme–phoneme recoding strategies in order to become efficient at decoding print. The English orthography is characterized by both feedforward and feedback inconsistency.

Conclusion There is now overwhelming evidence for a causal link between children’s phonological awareness skills and their progress in reading and spelling across languages. Indeed, the demonstration of the importance of phonological awareness for literacy has been hailed as a success story of developmental psychology (see Adams, 1990; Lundberg, 1991; Stanovich, 1992). Nevertheless, perhaps surprisingly, there are still those who dispute that the link exists. For example, Castles and Coltheart (2004) recently argued that ‘‘no single study has provided unequivocal evidence that there is a causal link from competence in phonological awareness to success in reading and spelling acquisition’’ (Castles and Coltheart, 2004: 77). In a critical review, they considered and dismissed studies regarded by developmental psychologists as very influential (for example, the large-scale studies by Bradley and Bryant, 1983; Bryant et al., 1990; Lundberg et al., 1988; and Schneider et al., 1997, 2000 described in this article). This is surprising, because these studies used strong research designs whereby (a) they were longitudinal in nature; (b) they began studying the participants when they were prereaders; and (c) they tested the longitudinal correlations found between phonological awareness and literacy via intervention and training, thereby demonstrating a specific link that did not extend (for example) to mathematics. However, the apparent conundrum is easily solved. Castles and Coltheart based their critique on two a priori assumptions concerning phonological development and reading acquisition that are misguided. One was that the most basic speech units of a language are phonemes (Castles and Coltheart, 2004: 78), and the second was that it is impossible to derive a pure measure of phonological awareness if a child knows any alphabetic letters (Castles and Coltheart, 2004: 84). In fact, many psycholinguists

argue that the most basic speech units of a language are syllables, not phonemes. Phonemes are not basic speech units prior to literacy; indeed, letter learning is required in order for awareness of phonemes to develop. Measures of phonological awareness in preschoolers are syllable, onset, and rime measures, which can be administered as early as age 2 or 3. Phonological awareness of these units does seem to develop in the absence of letter knowledge (recall, for example, the good onset/rime skills of 3-year-old Chinese children). Taken to the extreme, however, the second assumption (that phonological awareness measures are impure once letter knowledge commences) is difficult to tackle. In alphabetic languages, it is very difficult to find preschoolers who know no letters at all. Even 2-year-olds in literate societies tend to know the letters in their names, and thereby probably know at least 4–5 letters. Nevertheless, the balance of the evidence supports a fundamental relationship between a child’s phonological sensitivity and their acquisition of reading and spelling skills. While the specific tasks and levels of phonological awareness that will best predict literacy are likely to depend on an individual’s level of development, there does seem to be an apparently universal sequence of development from awareness of large units (syllables, onsets, rimes) to awareness of small units (phonemes). Within this apparently universal sequence of development, variations in phonological structure, and variations in the consistency with which phonology is represented in orthography, generate cross-language differences. The nature of these cross-language differences can be predicted a priori by considering the availability and consistency of phonological and orthographic units at different grain sizes. See also: Developmental Dyslexia and Dysgraphia; Reading Processes in Adults; Reading Processes in Children.

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Phonological Change in Optimality Theory R Bermu´dez-Otero, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

As has normally been the case for all major phonological frameworks, the relationship between Optimality Theory (OT) and historical phonology works both ways: OT provides new angles on long-standing diachronic questions, whereas historical data and models of change bear directly on the assessment of OT. For our purposes, it is convenient to classify phonological changes under two headings, roughly corresponding to the neogrammarian categories of ‘sound change’ and ‘analogy’:

2. What optimality-theoretic resources best explain reanalysis: input optimization, innate biases in the ranking of output–output correspondence constraints, both, or neither? The answers to these questions may require OT to depart significantly from the form in which it was first proposed (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). OT may need to acknowledge that markedness constraints are not innate but are rather constructed by the child during acquisition, and it may need to adopt a stratal–cyclic approach to morphology–phonology and syntax–phonology interactions.

The Role of Markedness in Phonological Change

1. In phonologization, extragrammatical phonetic effects give rise to new phonological patterns. 2. In reanalysis, a conservative grammar is replaced by an innovative grammar that generates some of the old phonological output in a new way.

OT asserts that speakers of natural languages know implicitly that certain phonological structures are dispreferred or suboptimal. This knowledge is represented in their grammars by means of violable markedness constraints, such as the following:

In this light, one can see that phonological change raises two main questions for OT:

(1a) VOICEDOBSTRUENTPROHIBITION Assign one violation mark for every segment bearing the features [-sonorant, þvoice]. (1b) CODACOND-[voice] Assign one violation mark for every token of the feature [voice] that is exhaustively dominated by rhymal segments.

1. Is markedness a mere epiphenomenon of recurrent processes of phonologization, or does markedness on the contrary constrain both phonologization and reanalysis?