ABSTRACT
Phonological awareness refers to the child’s ability to detect and manipulate component sounds in words, and is the key predictor of how well a child will learn to read and write their language (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Lundberg, Olofsson & Wall, 1980; Schneider, Roth & Ennemoser, 2000). Phonological awareness is usually assumed to develop via the implicit and then increasingly explicit organisation of the phonological representations that underpin spoken language use. The worlds’ languages differ greatly in their phonological complexity, varying for example in syllable structure and the number of vowels and consonant phonemes in the phonological repertoire. Nevertheless, despite these differences, children in all languages so far studied appear to follow a similar developmental pathway in terms of phonological awareness. Children first become aware of relatively “large” phonological units in words, such as syllables, onset-vowel units (e.g., morae) or rimes (vowel-coda units). If they learn to read an alphabetic orthography, they then become aware of smaller units of sound (phonemes) corresponding to graphemes (letters or letter clusters). As there are a variety of ways in which the alphabetic orthographies of the world represent the sound patterns of the worlds’ languages, there are differences in the rate and ease of developing such “small unit” knowledge. Nevertheless, these differences can be analysed systematically. Here I present an analysis based on the “psycholinguistic grain size” theoretical framework for single word recognition that I have developed with Johannes Ziegler (e.g., Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton & Schneider, 2001, 2003;
Ziegler & Goswami, 2005). This framework also enables me to highlight gaps in the current research literature.
