ABSTRACT
It is possible that poor phonological awareness and/or weak or insecure phonological representations in memory are a reflection of faulty speech perception processes (Godfrey, Syrdal-Lasky, Millay, & Knox, 1981; Watson & Miller, 1993). Correlations between speech perception scores and phonological awareness or phonological memory as measured by, for example, phoneme segmentation and digit span (Watson & Miller, 1993) or naming ability (McBride-Chang, 1996) have been reported by several workers (Hurford, 1991; Manis et al., 1997; McBride-Chang, 1995). However, to demonstrate a relationship between speech perception and phonological awareness does not establish that problems in speech perception are causally related to reading difficulties. However, since certain perceptual aspects of speech are important in developing phonemic awareness (Yavas & Gogate, 1999), it would not be surprising to find that reading ability is related to speech perception.
