ABSTRACT
There can be little doubt that phonological awareness plays an important role in reading. The results of a large number of studies amply demonstrate a strong (and consistent) relationship between children's ability to disentangle and to assemble the sounds in words and their progress in learning to read. The enterprise of establishing the importance of phonological awareness has been a strikingly successful one. It has immediate educational implications, and it will also undoubtedly play a great part in theories about learning to read. To establish a causal relationship between a child's preschool skills at rhyme and alliteration and his or her later success in reading, one has to show two things. One is that there is a relationship between these two skills, and the other is that training the former skill improves the latter. Three longitudinal studies have shown a striking relationship between children's early rhyming skills and their later progress in reading.
