ABSTRACT
Linguistic awareness is seen as a development of linguistic abilities beyond what is needed for speech perception and production. According to another way of thinking, linguistic awareness is closely tied to cognitive development and reflects the change in cognitive functioning that is observed in children during middle childhood, approximately from four to eight years of age. Several suggestions have been made about how to define linguistic awareness, focusing on either linguistic or psychological aspects of the concept. Phonologically disordered children, like normally developing children, seem to be able to segment words at the level of the syllable before they are able to do the same operation at the level of the phoneme. Studies of metalinguistic awareness in phonologically disordered children are consistent in showing a majority of the disordered children to be less aware of language than normal children. In most studies of disordered children’s rhyming, some type of rhyme-detection task has been used.
