ABSTRACT
Several studies involving a wide variety of tasks and procedures have examined the development of young children's ability to segment spoken words into their constituent phonemic elements. Much of this research has been stimulated by the possibility that children's awareness of the phonemes which constitute spoken words may be an important prerequisite for being able to learn to read. This chapter deals with the relationship between the development of phonological awareness and reading instruction. There are at least two possibilities, the first being that reading instruction greatly influences the development of phonological awareness and the second that phonological awareness develops largely independently of reading instruction, possibly being closely related to other aspects of cognitive and/or linguistic development. One task that has been used to assess phonological awareness in children is the phoneme tapping task developed by I. Y. Liberman, Shank-weiler, F. W. Fischer, and B. Carter.
