ABSTRACT
The results of reading age match experiments suggest that child's phonological awareness does affect reading – that the causal links go that way. Two experiments looked at children reading both real words and nonsense words like "molsmit." The data on the phonological difficulties of poor readers suggest an interesting hypothesis: That sensitivity to the sounds in words is one of the main reasons for discrepancies between how well children read and how well one would expect them to read given their mental age. One of the things that children who are learning to read and write must do is to come to terms with the alphabet and with the fact that words and syllables can be broken up into smaller units of sound, which themselves are represented by the letters. The data on children with reading problems certainly suggest a plausible causal hypothesis about the influence of phonological awareness on normal children when they are learning to read and write.
