Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics || Phonological Awareness and Literacy

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Techmer F (1890). ‘Beitrag zur Geschichte der franzo-sischen und englishchen Phonetik und Phonographie.’IZ fur allgemeine Sprachwissenschafr 5, 145–295.

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Vietor W (1898). Elemente der phonetik (4th edn.). Leipzig:O. R. Reisland.

Phonological Awareness and Literacy 489

Phonological Awareness and Lit
eracy U Goswami, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

There is growing empirical evidence from a variety oflanguages for a causal connection between phonolog-ical awareness and literacy development. Phonologi-cal awareness is usually defined as the child’s abilityto detect and manipulate component sounds in words.Component sounds can be defined at a number ofdifferent linguistic levels, for example syllables versusrhymes. As children acquire language, they becomeaware of the sound patterning characteristic of theirlanguage, and use similarities and differences inthis sound patterning as one means of organizing themental lexicon (see Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). Indescribing how phonological awareness is related toliteracy, I will discuss three kinds of empirical data: (a)developmental studies measuring children’s phono-logical skills in different languages; (b) developmentalstudies measuring longitudinal connections betweenphonology and reading in different languages, and (c)studies seeking to test whether the connection be-tween phonological awareness and literacy is causal(via training phonological skills). I will argue that thedevelopment of reading is founded in phonologicalprocessing across languages. However, as languagesvary in their phonological structure and also in theconsistency with which phonology is represented inorthography, cross-language differences in the devel-opment of certain aspects of phonological awarenessand in the development of phonological recodingstrategies should be expected across orthographies.

After discussing the empirical evidence, I will con-clude by showing that data from different languagescan be described theoretically by a PsycholinguisticGrain Size theory of reading, phonology, and devel-opment (Goswami et al., 2001, 2003; Ziegler andGoswami, 2005). According to this theory, whilethe sequence of phonological development maybe language universal, the ways in which sounds aremapped to letters (or other orthographic symbols)may be language-specific. In particular, solutions to

the ‘mapping problem’ of how sounds are related tosymbols appear to differ with orthographic consisten-cy. When orthographies allow 1:1 mappings betweensymbols and sounds (e.g., Spanish, a transparent orconsistent orthography), children learn to read rela-tively quickly. When orthographies have a many:1mapping between sound and symbol (feedback incon-sistency, which is very characteristic of French, as inpain/fin/hein/) or between symbol and sound (feedfor-ward inconsistency, very characteristic of English, e.g.cough/rough/bough), children learn to read moreslowly. French and English are examples of nontran-sparent or inconsistent orthographies. My basic argu-ment throughout this article will be that the linguisticrelativity of phonological and orthographic struc-tures is central to understanding the development ofphonological awareness and reading.

Phonological Awareness in DifferentLanguages

According to hierarchical theories of syllable struc-ture (see Treiman, 1988), there are at least three lin-guistic levels at which phonological awareness can bemeasured. Children can become aware that (a) wordscan be broken down into syllables (e.g., two syllablesin wigwam, three syllables in butterfly); (b) syllablescan be broken down into onset/rime units: to divide asyllable into onset and rime, divide at the vowel, as int-eam, dr-eam, str-eam (The term ‘rime’ is used be-cause words with more than one syllable have morethan one rime, for example, in captain and chaplain,the rimes are -ap and -ain, respectively. The rimes areidentical, but these words would not conventionallybe considered to rhyme, because they do not shareidentical phonology after the first onset, as do rabbitand habit, for example; this shared portion is some-times called the ‘superrime.’); and (c) onsets and rimescan be broken down into sequences of phonemes.Phonemes are the smallest speech sounds making upwords, and in the reading literature are usually de-fined in terms of alphabetic letters. Linguistically,phonemes are a relatively abstract concept defined

Figure 1 Psycholinguistic units in words according to hierar-

chical theories of syllable structure.

490 Phonological Awareness and Literacy

in terms of sound substitutions that change meaning.For example, pill and pit differ in terms of their finalphoneme, and pill and pal differ in terms of theirmedial phoneme. The mechanism for learning aboutphonemes seems to be learning about letters. Lettersare used to symbolize phonemes, even though the phy-sical sounds corresponding (for example) to the ‘P’in pit, lap, and spoon are rather different. In alllanguages studied to date, phonemic awarenessappears to emerge as a consequence of being taughtto read and write. In general, prereading children andilliterate adults perform poorly in tasks requiringthem to manipulate or to detect single phonemes(e.g., Goswami and Bryant, 1990; Morais et al.,1979).

Studies of the development of phonological aware-ness across languages suggest, perhaps surprisingly,that the early emergence of phonological awarenessat the level of syllables and onset-rimes is fairly uni-versal. Children in all languages so far studied showabove-chance performance in phonological aware-ness tasks at the syllable and onset/rime level longbefore they go to school. Cross-language studiesdo not show uniform patterns of development forphoneme awareness, however. Phoneme awarenessdevelops rapidly in some languages once schoolingcommences, but not in others. Children learningtransparent orthographies such as Greek, Finnish,German, and Italian acquire phonemic awareness rel-atively quickly. Children learning nontransparentorthographies such as English, Danish, and Frenchare much slower to acquire phonemic awareness.

The development of phonological awareness inchildren can be measured using a variety of tasks.For example, children may be asked to monitor andcorrect speech errors (e.g., sie to pie), to select the oddword out in terms of sound (e.g., which word doesnot rhyme: pin, win, sit), to make a judgment aboutsound similarity (e.g., do these two words share asyllable? hammer, hammock), to segment words bytapping with a stick (e.g., tap out the componentsounds in soap¼ three taps), and to blend soundsinto words (e.g., d-ish, or d-i-sh to make dish; seefor example, Bradley and Bryant, 1983; Chaney,1992; Liberman et al., 1974; Metsala, 1999; Treimanand Zukowski, 1991). However, as well as measuringdifferent levels of phonological awareness, these tasksalso make differing cognitive demands on youngchildren. In order to investigate the sequence ofthe development of phonological awareness, ideallythe cognitive demands of a particular task shouldbe equated across linguistic level. This is even moreimportant to achieve when comparing the develop-ment of phonological awareness across differentlanguages.

Unfortunately, it is rare to find research papers inwhich the same task has been used to study the emer-gence of phonological awareness at the different lin-guistic levels of syllable, rhyme, and phoneme. Themost comprehensive studies in English are those re-cently conducted by Anthony and his colleagues(Anthony et al., 2002, 2003; Anthony and Lonigan,2004). For example, Anthony et al. (2003) usedblending and deletion tasks at the word, syllable,onset/rime, and phoneme level. They also studied alarge group of children (more than 1,000 children)and included a much wider age range than manystudies (2–6 years). Using sophisticated statisticaltechniques including hierarchical loglinear analyses,and a factorial design that allowed them to investi-gate the order of acquisition of phonological skills,they showed that children’s progressive awareness oflinguistic units followed the hierarchical model ofword structure shown in Figure 1. Children generallymastered word-level skills before they mastered sylla-ble-level skills, they mastered syllable-level skills be-fore onset/rime skills, and they mastered onset/rime-level skills before phoneme skills.

These findings with respect to sequence are mir-rored by many other studies conducted in Englishusing a variety of tasks to measure awareness ofsyllables, onsets, rimes, and phonemes. For example,counting tasks (in which children tap with a stick orput out counters to represent the number of syllablesor phonemes in a word) and oddity tasks (in whichchildren select the odd word out in terms of eitheronset/rimes or phonemes) have yielded a similar de-velopmental picture (e.g., Goswami and East, 2000;Liberman et al., 1974; Perfetti et al., 1987; Tunmerand Nesdale, 1985). Counting and oddity tasks areuseful for comparisons across languages, as bothtasks have been used by researchers in other lan-guages to measure syllable, onset/rime, and phonemeskills. Relevant data for syllable and onset/rimeawareness are shown in Table 1. It appears that,where comparisons are possible, preschoolers in alllanguages so far studied have good phonologicalawareness at the large-unit level of syllables, onsets,and rimes. For large units, phonological awarenessappears to emerge as a natural consequence of

Table 1 Data (% correct) from studies comparing syllable

(counting task) and rhyme awareness (oddity task) in different

languages

Language Syllable Rhyme

Greeka 98 90

Turkishb 94 –

Norwegianc 83 91h

Germand 81 73i

Frenche 73 –

Englishf 90 71j

Chineseg – 68

aPorpodas, 1999.bDurgunoglu and Oney, 1999.cHoien et al., 1995.dWimmer et al., 1991.eDemont and Gombert, 1996.fLiberman et al., 1974.gHo and Bryant, 1997.hrhyme matching task.iWimmer et al., 1994.jBradley 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 98

Turkishb 94

Italianc 97

Norwegiand 83

Germane 81

Frenchf 73

Englishg 70

Englishh 71

Englishi 65

aHarris and Giannoulis, 1999.bDurgunoglu and Oney, 1999.cCossu et al., 1988.dHoien et al., 1995.eWimmer et al., 1991.fDemont and Gombert, 1996.gLiberman et al., 1974.hTunmer and Nesdale, 1985.iPerfetti et al., 1987 and Grade 2 children.


language acquisition. This is presumably because ofspeech-perceptual factors that are common across alllanguages using the syllable as the primary unit ofphonology (see Richardson et al., 2004; Ziegler andGoswami, 2005, for relevant discussion).

As noted above, phoneme awareness is heavily de-pendent on letter learning. Awareness of phonemesusually emerges fairly rapidly in languages with con-sistent orthographies, and in languages with simplesyllable structure (languages based on consonant–vowel (CV) syllables. In these languages, such asItalian and Spanish, onset/rime segmentation (avail-able prior to literacy) is equivalent to phonemicsegmentation (theoretically learned via literacy) formany words (e.g., casa, mama). In Spanish andItalian, one letter consistently maps to one phoneme.Many of those phonemes are already represented inthe spoken lexicon of word forms, because they areonsets 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 ortho-graphies with a simple syllable structure are bestplaced to solve the mapping problem of mappingunits of print (letters) to units of sound (phonemes).

Children learning languages with more complexsyllable structures, such as German, face a more diffi-cult mapping problem. In such languages, onset/rimesegmentation is not usually equivalent to phonemicsegmentation for most words. This is because mostwords either have codas (consonant phonemes) afterthe vowel (e.g., Hand) or complex (consonant cluster)onsets (e.g., Pflaum [plum]). However, for languageslike German, the orthography is consistent: one letter

does map to one and only one phoneme. Hence lettersare a consistent clue to phonemes. The German childis still at an advantage in terms of developing pho-neme awareness. The child faced with the most diffi-cult mapping problem in initial reading is the childlearning to read an orthographically inconsistent lan-guage that also has a complex syllable structure.Examples include English, French, Danish, andPortuguese. For English, onset/rime segmentation israrely equivalent to phonemic segmentation. Englishhas a relatively large number of monosyllables(around 4000), and of these only about 4.5% have aCV structure (see De Cara and Goswami, 2002). Oneletter does not consistently map to one phoneme forreading; instead one letter may map to as many as fiveor more phonemes (e.g., the letter A). Accordingly,phonemic awareness develops relatively slowly in En-glish-speaking children. This is illustrated by the pho-neme counting studies carried out in differentlanguages summarized in Table 2.

The development of phoneme awareness in differ-ent languages is mirrored by the ease of acquiringgrapheme–phoneme recoding skills, termed the sinequa non of reading acquisition by Share (1995). Aspointed out by Share and many others, phonologicalrecoding (recoding letters into sounds) functions as aself-teaching device, allowing the child successfully torecode words that they have heard but never seenbefore (see also Ehri, 1992). As may be expectedgiven the preceding analysis, grapheme–phonemerecoding skills develop relatively rapidly in consistentorthographies, and relatively slowly in inconsistent

Table 3 Data (% correct) from the COSTA8 study of grapheme–

phoneme recoding skills for monosyllables in 14 European

languages (adapted from Seymour et al., 2003)

Language Familiar real words Nonwords

Greek 98 97

Finnish 98 98

German 98 98

Austrian German 97 97

Italian 95 92

Spanish 95 93

Swedish 95 91

Dutch 95 90

Icelandic 94 91

Norwegian 92 93

French 79 88

Portuguese 73 76

Danish 71 63

Scottish English 34 41


orthographies. This is shown most clearly by a recentstudy comparing grapheme–phoneme recoding skillsduring the first year of schooling in the countriesmaking up the European Community (EC) at thetime that the data were gathered (Seymour et al.,2003). The children in the study received simplewords and nonwords to recode, matched for famil-iarity as far as possible across orthography. Althoughthe age of school entry varies across the EC, thesuccess rates achieved by children in the differentcountries appear very closely tied to the transparencyand phonological structure of the different languages.Children learning to read consistent languages withsimple syllable structures (e.g., Finnish, Italian) wereclose to ceiling in grapheme–phoneme recoding abili-ty. Children learning to read inconsistent languageswith complex syllable structures (e.g., Danish,French, English) were not. The data from this studyare reproduced in Table 3.

Developmental studies measuring children’s pho-nological awareness in different languages allowsome simple conclusions. The awareness of syllables,onsets, and rimes appears to emerge as a naturalconsequence of language acquisition in typically de-veloping children across languages (note: this is notso for dyslexic children, see Developmental Dyslexiaand Dysgraphia). Awareness of these large units ofphonology is present by the age of around 3–4 years,long before children go to school and begin beingtaught to read. The awareness of phonemes does notappear to emerge as a natural consequence of lan-guage acquisition. Rather, it is an effortful conse-quence of reading acquisition. The rate ofdevelopment of phonemic awareness varies systemat-ically with the phonological structure of the languagebeing learned and its orthographic consistency.

Longitudinal Associations betweenPhonological Awareness and ReadingAcross Languages

The existence of a longitudinal connection betweenindividual differences in children’s phonologicalawareness measured prior to schooling and theirlater progress in reading and spelling has beenknown for at least 20 years. In a seminal study inEnglish, Bradley and Bryant (1983) demonstrated theimportance of onset/rime awareness for subsequentreading development using the oddity task (e.g.,which word does not rhyme: pin, win, sit). Bradleyand Bryant gave oddity tasks to 400 preschoolersand found that onset/rime awareness was a signifi-cant predictor of their progress in reading andspelling measured at 8 and 9 years. This longitudinalcorrelation remained significant even when other fac-tors such as IQ and memory were controlled in mul-tiple regression equations. Subsequently, Macleanet al. (1987) reported a significant connection be-tween rhyming skills at age 3 measured via nurseryrhyme knowledge and single word reading at 4 yearsand 6 months. Following up Maclean et al.’s sample2 years later, Bryant et al. (1990) reported a signifi-cant relationship between nursery rhyme knowledgeat age 3 and success in reading and spelling at ages5 and 6, even after factors such as social backgroundand IQ were controlled.

These findings for English have been replicated bya number of other research groups. For example,Burgess and Lonigan (1998) found that phonologicalsensitivity measured in a large sample of 115 4- and5-year-old children (measured by the oddity task andtasks requiring children to blend and segment com-pound words into words or syllables) predicted per-formance in both letter-name and letter-soundknowledge tasks 1 year later (called rudimentary read-ing skills by the authors). Cronin and Carver (1998)used an onset oddity task and a rhyme matching taskto measure phonological sensitivity in a group of 575-year-olds and found that phonological sensitivitysignificantly discriminated the three different achieve-ment levels used to group the children in terms ofreading ability at the end of first grade, even whenvocabulary levels were controlled. Baker et al. (1998)showed that kindergarten nursery rhyme knowledgewas the strongest predictor of word attack and wordidentification skills measured in grade 2, accountingfor 36% and 48% of the variance, respectively. Thesecond strongest predictor was letter knowledge,which accounted for an additional 11% and 18% ofthe variance, respectively. Note that these studies ofpreschoolers do not typically use phonemic measuresof phonological awareness. This is because phonemic


awareness is so difficult to measure in prereaders,unless it is awareness of onsets.

Studies in other languages support the researchfindings typical of English, with some variation.A German study using the oddity task tested children(n¼ 183) in their first month of schooling, when theywere aged on average 6 years 11 months (Wimmeret al., 1994). Follow-up measures of reading andspelling were taken both 1 year later and 3 yearslater. Wimmer et al. (1994) found that performancein the oddity task was only minimally related toreading and spelling progress in German childrenwhen they were 7–8 years old (the same age as thechildren in Bradley and Bryant’s study). However,significant predictive relationships were found inthe 3-year follow-up, when the children were agedon average 9 years 9 months. At this point, rimeawareness (although not onset awareness) was signif-icantly related to both reading and spelling develop-ment. A large-scale longitudinal study carried out byLundberg et al. (1980) with 143 Swedish kindergart-ners found an earlier connection. They gave a numberof phonological awareness tests, including rhymeproduction, phoneme segmentation, and phonemereversal to the children in kindergarten, and exam-ined the predictive relationships between these testsand reading attainment in second grade. Both therhyme test and the phoneme tests were significantpredictors of reading almost 2 years later. A study inNorwegian found a similar pattern of results. Hoienet al. (1995) reported that syllable, rhyme, and pho-neme awareness all made independent contributionsto variance in reading in a large group of 15,000children. Finally, recent studies of Chinese childrenalso report longitudinal relationships between phono-logical awareness and reading, even though Chinesechildren are learning a character-based rather than analphabetic orthography. For example, Ho and Bryant(1997) gave a rime oddity task to 100 Chinese pre-schoolers aged on average 3 years 11 months. Per-formance was impressive, at 68% correct, andsignificantly predicted progress in reading and spell-ing 2 years later, even after factors such as age, IQ,and mother’s educational level had been controlled.This study demonstrates that the predictive relation-ships between large units and reading are found fornonalphabetic orthographies, too.

Are Longitudinal Associations Evidencefor Causal Connections?

Although the predictive relations found betweenearly phonological awareness and later reading andspelling development are impressive, they do not nec-essarily mean that the connection is a causal one.

Even though most of the studies described abovecontrolled for other variables such as IQ when com-puting longitudinal relationships, in order to demon-strate a causal connection it is necessary to intervenedirectly. For example, if early phonological awarenesshas a direct effect on how well a child learns to readand spell, then guiding children to discover and at-tend to the phonological structure of language shouldhave a measurable impact on their reading progress.

A number of studies have used research designsthat included direct intervention. For example, aspart of the longitudinal study discussed earlier,Bradley and Bryant (1983) took the 60 children intheir cohort of 400 who had performed most poorlyin the oddity task at 4 and 5 years of age, and gavesome of them 2 years of training in grouping wordson 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, pla-cing pictures of a hat, a rat, a mat, and a bat togetherfor grouping by rhyme). A control group learned tosort the same pictures by semantic category (e.g.,farmyard animals). Half of the experimental groupalso spent the 2nd year of the study matching plasticletters to the shared phonological segments in wordslike hat, rat, and mat. Following the intervention, thechildren in the experimental group who had had plas-tic letter training were 8 months further on in readingthan the children in the semantic control group, and12 months further on in spelling, even after adjustingpost-test scores for age and IQ. Compared to thechildren who had spent the intervening period in anunseen control group, they were an astonishing24 months further on in spelling and 12 months inreading.

Similar results were found in a large study of 235Danish preschool children conducted by Lundberget al. (1988). Their training was much more intensivethan in the English study, and involved daily metalin-guistic games and exercises, such as clapping out thesyllables in words and attending to the first sounds inthe children’s names. Training was for a period of8 months and was aimed at guiding the children to‘discover and attend to the phonological structure oflanguage’ (Lundberg et al., 1988: 268). The effective-ness of the program was measured by comparing thechildren’s performance in various metalinguistic tasksafter training to that of 155 children in an unseencontrol group. The trained children were found tobe significantly ahead of the control children in avariety of metalinguistic skills including rhyming, syl-lable manipulation, and phoneme segmentation. Thelong-term effect of the training on the children’sreading and spelling progress in grades 1 and 2 wasalso assessed. The impact of the training was found to


be significant at both grades, for both reading andspelling, although effects were stronger for spelling.

Two training studies conducted in German founda similar pattern of results to those reported byLundberg et al. (1988). Schneider et al. (1997) devel-oped a 6-month metalinguistic training program cov-ering syllables, rhymes, and phonemes and gave thisto a sample of 180 kindergarten children. Readingand spelling progress was measured in grades 1 and 2.Schneider et al. found significant effects of the meta-linguistic training program on metalinguistic skills incomparison to an unseen control group, as would beexpected from Lundberg et al.’s (1988) results. Theyalso found significant long-term effects of metalin-guistic training on reading and spelling progress,with stronger effects for spelling.

In a second study, the same research group foundsignificant effects of the same training program on thereading and spelling progress of 138 German childrenassessed as being at risk for dyslexia in kindergarten(Schneider et al., 2000). Prior to training, the at-riskchildren were significantly poorer at rhyme produc-tion, rhyme matching, and syllable segmentation thanGerman control kindergartners, who were notthought to be at risk. This study used a nice researchdesign in which all children designated at risk receivedtraining (either metalinguistic training alone, letter-sound training alone, or both together). Their prog-ress was then compared to that of children from thesame kindergartens who had never been at risk. Theresearchers found that the at-risk children who hadreceived the combined training program were notsignificantly different in literacy attainment a yearinto first grade when compared to those childrenwho had never been at risk and who had received nokindergarten training. Interestingly, the at-risk groupwho received letter-sound training alone, withoutmetalinguistic training, either performed at compara-ble levels in later reading and spelling progress to themetalinguistic training alone group, or performed atlower levels than this group. Both groups werestill significantly impaired in literacy attainment incomparison to those children who had never been atrisk. This suggests that training either phonologicalawareness alone or training letter-sound recodingalone is insufficient. Both skills are important forearly literacy acquisition, at least for children thoughtto be at risk of reading failure. Training one set of skillswithout the other will not prevent literacy difficulties.

A Psycholinguistic Grain Size Model ofPhonological Awareness and Literacy

As shown by the studies reviewed above, the develop-ment of reading and spelling depends on phonological

awareness across all languages so far studied. Al-though apparently universal, specific characteristicsof this developmental relationship appear to varywith language. Of course, languages vary in the na-ture of their phonological structure, and also in theconsistency with which phonology is represented byorthography. This variation means that there are pre-dictable developmental differences in the ease withwhich phonological awareness at different ‘grainsizes’ emerges across orthography (and also in thegrain size of lexical representations and develop-mental reading strategies across orthographies; seeZiegler and Goswami, 2005).

According to psycholinguistic grain size theory,beginning readers are faced with three problems:availability, consistency, and granularity of symbol-to-sound mappings. The availability problem reflectsthe fact that not all phonological units are accessibleprior to reading. Most of the research discussed inthis article has been related to the availability prob-lem. Prior to reading, the main phonological units ofwhich children are aware are large units: syllables,onsets, and rimes. In alphabetic orthographies, theunits of print available are single letters, which corre-spond to phonemes, units not yet represented in anaccessible way by the child. Thus, connecting ortho-graphic units to phonological units that are notyet readily available requires further cognitive devel-opment. The rapidity with which phonemic aware-ness is acquired seems to vary systematically withorthographic consistency (see Table 2).

The consistency problem reflects the fact that someorthographic units have multiple pronunciations andthat some phonological units have multiple spellings(as discussed above, both feedforward and feedbackconsistency are important; see Ziegler et al., 1997).Psycholinguistic grain size theory assumes that bothtypes of inconsistency slow reading development.Importantly, the degree of inconsistency varies bothbetween languages and for different types of ortho-graphic units. For example, English has an unusuallyhigh degree of feedforward inconsistency at the rimelevel (from spelling to sound), whereas French has ahigh degree of feedback inconsistency (from sound tospelling; most languages have some degree of feed-back inconsistency). This cross-language variationmakes it likely a priori that there will be differencesin reading development across languages, and indeedthere are (see Table 3, and Ziegler and Goswami,2005, for a more comprehensive discussion). Finally,the granularity problem reflects the fact that there aremany more orthographic units to learn when accessto the phonological system is based on bigger grainsizes as opposed to smaller grain sizes. That is, thereare more words than there are syllables, more


syllables than there are rimes, more rimes than thereare graphemes, and more graphemes than there areletters. Psycholinguistic grain size theory argues thatreading proficiency depends on the resolution of thesethree problems, which will of necessity vary by or-thography. For example, children learning to readEnglish must develop multiple strategies in parallelin order to become successful readers. They needto develop whole word recognition strategies andrhyme analogy strategies (beak-peak, Goswami,1986) in addition to grapheme–phoneme recodingstrategies in order to become efficient at decodingprint. The English orthography is characterized byboth feedforward and feedback inconsistency.

Conclusion

There is now overwhelming evidence for a causal linkbetween children’s phonological awareness skills andtheir progress in reading and spelling across lan-guages. Indeed, the demonstration of the importanceof phonological awareness for literacy has beenhailed as a success story of developmental psychology(see Adams, 1990; Lundberg, 1991; Stanovich,1992). Nevertheless, perhaps surprisingly, there arestill those who dispute that the link exists. For exam-ple, Castles and Coltheart (2004) recently argued that‘‘no single study has provided unequivocal evidencethat there is a causal link from competence in phono-logical awareness to success in reading and spellingacquisition’’ (Castles and Coltheart, 2004: 77). In acritical review, they considered and dismissed stud-ies regarded by developmental psychologists asvery influential (for example, the large-scale studiesby 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 designswhereby (a) they were longitudinal in nature; (b) theybegan studying the participants when they wereprereaders; and (c) they tested the longitudinal corre-lations found between phonological awareness andliteracy via intervention and training, thereby demon-strating a specific link that did not extend (forexample) to mathematics.

However, the apparent conundrum is easily solved.Castles and Coltheart based their critique on twoa priori assumptions concerning phonological de-velopment and reading acquisition that are misguid-ed. One was that the most basic speech units of alanguage are phonemes (Castles and Coltheart,2004: 78), and the second was that it is impossibleto derive a pure measure of phonological awareness ifa child knows any alphabetic letters (Castles andColtheart, 2004: 84). In fact, many psycholinguists

argue that the most basic speech units of a languageare syllables, not phonemes. Phonemes are not basicspeech units prior to literacy; indeed, letter learning isrequired in order for awareness of phonemes to de-velop. Measures of phonological awareness in pre-schoolers are syllable, onset, and rime measures,which can be administered as early as age 2 or 3.Phonological awareness of these units does seemto develop in the absence of letter knowledge (recall,for example, the good onset/rime skills of 3-year-oldChinese children). Taken to the extreme, however, thesecond assumption (that phonological awarenessmeasures are impure once letter knowledge com-mences) is difficult to tackle. In alphabetic languages,it is very difficult to find preschoolers who know noletters at all. Even 2-year-olds in literate societiestend to know the letters in their names, and therebyprobably know at least 4–5 letters.

Nevertheless, the balance of the evidence supportsa fundamental relationship between a child’s phono-logical sensitivity and their acquisition of reading andspelling skills. While the specific tasks and levels ofphonological awareness that will best predict literacyare likely to depend on an individual’s level of devel-opment, there does seem to be an apparently univer-sal sequence of development from awareness of largeunits (syllables, onsets, rimes) to awareness of smallunits (phonemes). Within this apparently universalsequence of development, variations in phonologicalstructure, and variations in the consistency withwhich phonology is represented in orthography, gen-erate cross-language differences. The nature of thesecross-language differences can be predicted a prioriby considering the availability and consistency ofphonological and orthographic units at differentgrain sizes.

See also: Developmental Dyslexia and Dysgraphia;

Reading Processes in Adults; Reading Processes in Chil-

dren.

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Phonological Change in OptimalityR Bermudez-Otero, University of Manchester,Manchester, UK

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

As has normally been the case for all major phono-logical frameworks, the relationship between Opti-mality Theory (OT) and historical phonology worksboth ways: OT provides new angles on long-standingdiachronic questions, whereas historical data andmodels of change bear directly on the assessment ofOT. For our purposes, it is convenient to classifyphonological changes under two headings, roughlycorresponding to the neogrammarian categories of‘sound change’ and ‘analogy’:

1. In phonologization, extragrammatical phoneticeffects give rise to new phonological patterns.

2. In reanalysis, a conservative grammar is replacedby an innovative grammar that generates some ofthe old phonological output in a new way.

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

1. Is markedness a mere epiphenomenon of recurrentprocesses of phonologization, or does markednesson the contrary constrain both phonologizationand reanalysis?

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Theory2. What optimality-theoretic resources best explain

reanalysis: input optimization, innate biases in theranking of output–output correspondence con-straints, both, or neither?

The answers to these questions may require OT todepart significantly from the form in which it wasfirst proposed (Prince and Smolensky, 1993). OTmay need to acknowledge that markedness con-straints are not innate but are rather constructed bythe child during acquisition, and it may need to adopta stratal–cyclic approach to morphology–phonologyand syntax–phonology interactions.

The Role of Markedness inPhonological Change

OT asserts that speakers of natural languages knowimplicitly that certain phonological structures are dis-preferred or suboptimal. This knowledge is repre-sented in their grammars by means of violablemarkedness constraints, such as the following:

(1a) VOICEDOBSTRUENTPROHIBITION

Assign one violation mark for every segmentbearing the features [-sonorant, þvoice].

(1b) CODACOND-[�voice]Assign one violation mark for every token of the

feature [�voice] that is exhaustivelydominated by rhymal segments.

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