Emergence and Development of Phonological Awareness in 2.5- and 3.5-Year-Old Children Open Access

Abstract

Beginning readers decode words through pronunciation of the individual sounds represented by each letter in succession. This method requires not only the mapping of speech sounds onto their graphic representations, but also the more basic knowledge that words have the potential to be broken up into their component sounds, a skill called phonological awareness. Competency in phonological awareness is strongly associated with concurrent and later reading ability in young children, although the current literature posits that this knowledge only emerges at around 4 years of age. The accepted model of development postulates that phonological awareness is refined with increasing sensitivity to smaller intraword units. I proposed to test a different model that suggests phonological awareness undergoes a process of explicitization, such that early implicit and receptive knowledge later becomes accessible to explicit verbal report regardless of the size of the intraword unit. In this study, I aimed to determine whether 3.5- and 2.5-year-old children have receptive knowledge of phonological awareness that has been overlooked by the existing measures of this skill by implementing a novel measure with lower task demands. The results indicated that children at both 3.5 and 2.5 years old do possess receptive phonological awareness competency, and that variance in these abilities is predictive of improvement over a 6-month period. These findings challenge the accepted models of early phonological awareness development and urge further research into these abilities in very young children.

Table of Contents

I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………….........

1 The Development of Phonological Awareness 2 Common Measures of Phonological Awareness 4 Phonological Awareness and Reading Achievement 5 Phoneme-level Awareness 7 Theories of Phonological Awareness Development 9 Gaps in the Research 12 The Current Study 13

II. EXPERIMENT 1…………………………………………………………………

14 Method 15 Participants 15 Materials 15 Procedure 17 Results 19 Discussion 21

III. EXPERIMENT 2…………………………………………………………………

22 Method 22 Participants 22 Materials 22 Procedure 23 Results 23 Discussion 24

IV. EXPERIMENT 3…………………………………………………………………

25 Method 26 Participants 26 Materials 26 Procedure 26 Results 26 Discussion 27

V. GENERAL DISCUSSION…………………………………………………….

28 A Reexamination of Theoretical Models 28 Early Development of Phonological Awareness 31 The Validity of the Novel Measure 31 Limitations 32 Implications and Future Directions 33 Conclusion 35

VI. REFERENCES………………………………………………………………...

37

VII. TABLES & FIGURES………………………………………………………....

40

VIII. APPENDIX A…………………………………………………………………..

46 List of Minimal Pair Stimuli 46 Performance by Phoneme Contrast Categories 47

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Psychology and Linguistics
Degree	BA
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Language, Linguistics Education, Reading Psychology, Developmental
Keyword	Phonemes Representational redescription Early childhood development Phonological awareness Reading proficiency
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Namy, Laura, Emory University
Committee Members	Tamasi, Susan L, Emory University Feldman, Hernan, Emory University

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