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Changes in letter sound knowledge are
associated with development of
phonological awareness in
pre-school children
Judith G. Foy
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA
Virginia Mann
University of California, Irvine, USA
Letter sound knowledge, which, together with phonological awareness, is highly
predictive of pre-school children’s reading acquisition, derives from children’s
knowledge of their associated letter names and the phonological patterns of those
names. In this study of 66 monolingual pre-school children we examined whether
phonological patterns between letter names and their associated sounds might be
differentially associated with aspects of phonological awareness. Results suggest that
rudimentary levels of phonological awareness may facilitate the learning of letter
sound associations. However, more explicit phonological awareness appears to be
linked bi-directionally with letter sound knowledge with diverse name-sound
associations, with letter sound associations that do not follow regular patterns (e.g.
‘juh’ for ‘j’ and ‘huh’ for ‘h’) most closely associated with performance in more
complex phoneme awareness tasks.
The ability to identify and manipulate speech sounds, known as phonological awareness,
is now well recognised as one of the best determinants of successful early reading
acquisition (for example: Gottardo, Stanovich & Siegel, 1996; Lyon, 1995; Mann, 1998;
Muter & Snowling, 1998; Stanovich, 1994; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987). Letter
knowledge also emerges as an important factor in learning to read (Adams, 1990;
Bradley & Bryant, 1991; Ehri, 1983; Muter, 1994); in two recent studies of
kindergarteners from diverse linguistic backgrounds the two best predictors of early
reading were alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness skills (Chiappe, Siegel
& Gottardo, 2002; Muter & Diethelm, 2001). Children’s letter knowledge is also linked
to the development of phonological awareness (Stahl & Murray, 1994; Stuart &
Coltheart, 1988; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987) even amongst non-readers (Bowey, 1994;
Bowey & Francis, 1991; Wagner, Torgeson & Rashotte, 1994). However, the relationship
between letter knowledge and phonological awareness is not yet well understood.
Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9817.2006.00279.x
Volume 29, Issue 2, 2006, pp 143–161
rUnited Kingdom Literacy Association 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road,
Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Acquisition of phonological awareness appears to be associated with the development
of robust and highly differentiated phonological representations as well as with literacy
exposure (e.g. Foy & Mann, 2001, 2003). Increasing evidence suggests that exposure to
the alphabetic principle in the process of learning to read is a primary impetus for gaining
an explicit access to phonological representations (Mann & Wimmer, 2002; Morais,
Cary, Alegria & Bertelson, 1979; Read, Zhang, Nie & Ding, 1986). Another candidate
impetus is lexical restructuring; about the time that they begin to learn to read, children’s
lexicons may undergo significant restructuring (e.g. Metsala & Walley, 1998) as a result
of such factors as vocabulary expansion (e.g. Walley, 1993), a changing focus from
meaning to sound (Byrne & Liberman, 1999) and the learning of letter sound associations
(e.g. Barron, 1998; Treiman & Bourassa, 2000; Vihman, 1981, 1996). The acquisition of
letter sound knowledge can be important in either framework, for it is both a fundamental
part of learning to read an alphabetic orthography and a consequence of lexical
acquisition.
Success in learning to read any alphabet requires that the child learn to map the letters
to their associated phonemes. English, unlike some alphabetic systems, distinguishes
between letter names and letter sounds, and our question is how names and sounds relate
to children’s attainment of phoneme awareness and the mapping of letter to phoneme. In
the vernacular, use of letter names is perhaps most common, being the parlance of oral
spellings, the ABC song, ABC books, telephone numbers, etc. Letter sounds are
predominately used as a teaching device when children are first taught to read and spell,
probably because the highly regular syllable structure of letter sounds can make letter-to-
phoneme mapping more apparent. Letter names bear a complex and variant relation to
the phonemes that the letters represent – consider how the names of ‘c’, ‘w’, ‘f’ and ‘t’
relate to the phoneme being represented. Letter sounds do away with the vagaries of the
relationship by having all consonant letter sounds as monosyllables consisting of the
phoneme followed by /=/. This regularity seems to have its pay-off from the perspective
of beginning readers. For example, studies of beginning readers have shown that early
reading acquisition appears to be best facilitated by training of phonological awareness
skills that is combined with training of letter sound relationships (Bradley & Bryant,
1983; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1990; Defior & Tudela, 1994). They have shown how
phonological awareness skills are enhanced in children who have received phonological
awareness training combined with explicit instruction in letter sound relationships (Ball
& Blachman, 1991; Barron, Golden, Seldon, Tait, Marmurek & Haines, 1992; Byrne &
Fielding-Barnsley, 1990; Hohn & Ehri, 1983).
Directly bridging between letter sound knowledge and phonological awareness,
Treiman has shown that when children begin to see letter names as ‘maps of phonemic
content’ (1998, p. 296), that is, when they begin to appreciate the name-sound
connection, their phonological representations may change from holistic categories (e.g.
Treiman et al., 1995). The representations come to reflect conventional orthographic
principles specific to the native language (e.g. Ehri & Wilce, 1985) and typically involve
smaller phonemic units.
Pre-school children appear to use letter name knowledge to develop letter sound
correspondences (Treiman, 1993; Treiman, Tincoff, Rodriguez, Monzaki & Francis,
1998; Treiman, Weatherston & Berch, 1994); specific aspects of letter knowledge may be
especially helpful. As can be seen in Table 1, many of the names of the letters in the
English alphabet follow phonological patterns.
1
For example, 31% of the names of
English letters (Category 1: b, c, d, g, p, t, v and z)
2
rhyme with each other and share the
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phonological structure {onset 1/i/}, where the onset is the phoneme that the letter ‘stands
for’. Treiman, Tincoff and Richmond-Welty (1997) examined whether pre-schoolers
demonstrate apprehension of these most common letter name-letter sound relationships in
English by asking the children to identify whether various syllables were letters. Children
made significantly more false positive errors for syllables that shared the same
phonological structure as the rhyming, ‘regular’ category (e.g. /gi/) than for syllables that
did not share this phonological structure (e.g. /ga/ or /ig/). The authors proposed that
children develop an ‘implicit sensitivity to the phonological structure of letter names’ (p.
407) derived from generalisations they make about common letter name-letter sound
relationships. Treiman and her colleagues also demonstrated that explicit letter sound
training for pre-schoolers is more effective for Category 1 letters than for letters whose
names and sounds involve other less systematic relationships (e.g. ‘k’, ‘w’; Treiman
et al., 1998). The rhyming, regular structure for Category 1 letters appears to make it
harder to learn their associated letter names (Treiman & Kessler, 2003), perhaps because
the letter names in this category are not phonologically distinct. However, this same
structure may make it easier for children to learn the associated letter sounds, since these
names contain the associated sound in the onset (see McBride-Chang, 1999; Treiman
et al., 1998; see Table 1).
As children move from knowing letter names to letter sounds, a critical question to
address is whether phonological awareness facilitates the learning of letter sound
relationships, or whether the acquisition of letter sound knowledge is responsible for
changes in phonological processing. Learning about letter sound correspondences may
change phonological awareness (e.g. Ehri, 1984, 1987; Morais, 1991; Morais, Alegria &
Content, 1987a, 1987b), but the literature also suggests that changes in children’s
phonological awareness may facilitate the learning of early alphabetic relationships (e.g.
Jorm & Share, 1983; Liberman, Shankweiler & Liberman, 1989; Wagner & Torgesen,
1987). Given that several previous studies have proposed that the relationship between
letter knowledge and phonological awareness is reciprocal (e.g. Barron, 1998; Burgess &
Lonigan, 1998; Morais et al., 1979; Perfetti, Beck, Bell & Hughes, 1987; Read et al.,
1986; Stanovich, 1986; Wagner, Torgesen & Rashotte, 1994), it may be fruitful to
explore the possible bi-directionality of the relationship. For example, Burgess and
Lonigan (1998) replicated the finding that letter name knowledge predicts phonological
sensitivity (shallow or rudimentary aspects of phonological awareness) a year later, but
also showed that phonological sensitivity was an even better predictor of letter knowledge.
These results suggest that phonological awareness, long known to be associated with
reading acquisition, may also be linked with the ease with which children learn letter
Table 1. Categories for letter names.
a
Category Letters Percentage of alphabet Phonological structure of letter names
1 b, c, d, g, p, t, v, z 31% consonant 1/i/; rhyme with each other
2 f, l, m, n, s, x 23% /E/ 1consonant
3 a, e, i, o, u 19% inconsistent
j, k, q, y 15%
h, r 8%
w4%
Note:
a
Adapted from Treiman, Tincoff and Richmond-Welty (1997).
LETTER KNOWLEDGE AND PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 145
rUnited Kingdom Literacy Association 2006
names and their associated sounds. Phonological awareness is arguably not a unitary
concept, however. Rhyme and phoneme awareness appear to represent separable skills
(e.g. Carroll, Snowling, Hulme & Stevenson, 2003; Foy & Mann, 2001; Hoeien,
Lundberg, Stanovich & Bjaalid, 1995; Muter, Hulme, Snowling & Taylor, 1998;
Stanovich, 1986). Furthermore, there may be levels within phoneme awareness; deeper
levels, requiring more explicit knowledge about phonemes, may mediate phoneme
manipulation tasks such as deletion and substitution, whereas shallower levels may be
tapped by phoneme judgement tasks (Stanovich, 1986). Rhyme awareness, considered an
even shallower level of phonological awareness (e.g. Stanovich, 1986) is not as
consistently found to be a predictor of reading in pre-school children (e.g. Blaiklock,
2004; Hulme, Hatcher, Nation, Brown, Adams & Stuart, 2002; Muter & Diethelm, 2001;
Muter et al., 1998; but see Bryant, 2002 for a contrasting view).
We have previously shown that rhyme awareness is less closely associated with formal
literacy exposure than are levels of phoneme awareness, which appear to be dependent
upon such exposure (Foy & Mann, 2003; Mann & Foy, 2003). When we look at these
relations chronologically, we may thus find that children who have an appreciation for
the concept of rhyme – realising that words can share the same rime portion but have
different onsets – may be better able to deduce the sounds of the ‘regular’ letters (i.e. b, c,
d, g, p, t, v and z). They may be able to isolate the onset from the rime portion of each
letter name, enabling them easily to learn the sounds associated with these letters because
their names all share the same rime portion. Thus, letter sound knowledge for these letters
is not an obvious antecedent of rhyming, but we would anticipate that rhyme awareness
skills would predict letter sounds knowledge for these ‘regular’ letter names.
From Stanovich’s (1986) view that deeper levels of phonological awareness (explicit
knowledge of the phoneme) are relatively dependent upon formal literacy exposure (e.g.
Carroll et al., 2003; Foy & Mann, 2001), we would expect that the development of
phoneme awareness may also require an appreciation of more complex letter sound
relationships, such as also learning the sounds associated with letters whose names
contain their associated sound at the end of the name (f, l, m, n, s and x), and sounds that
are associated with their associated letter names in irregular ways (a, e, i, o, u, j, k, q, y, h,
r and w).
Although the literature linking phonological awareness, letter knowledge and early
reading suggests reciprocal development rather than simple cause-effect relationships,
few longitudinal studies have addressed this question directly. A recent exception is
Blaiklock (2004), who showed that the relation between reading and phonological
awareness was strongly mediated by both letter name and letter sound knowledge
relationships in early readers. In the present short-term longitudinal study, we will
examine the association between knowledge of letter names and sounds, rhyme
awareness, deep and shallow aspects of phoneme awareness and early reading skill,
explicitly addressing whether the acquisition of specific letter knowledge associates with
phonological awareness.
Hypotheses
Specifically we predicted that:
H1: Letter sound knowledge will be highest for letters whose names share a rhyming,
regular phonological structure and whose sound is contained in the onset (Category 1),
146 FOY and MANN
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next highest for letters whose names share a regular, non-rhyming phonological structure
(Category 2) and lowest for letters that do not share a phonological structure (Category 3).
H2: Letter sound categories varying by phonological structure will differentially
predict phonological awareness. Specifically, letter sound knowledge at T1 for Category
1 letters whose names rhyme will be associated more closely at T2 with rhyme awareness
than will T1 letter sound knowledge for letters in the non-rhyming categories 2 and 3.
Letter sound knowledge at T1 for Category 3 letters (e.g. a, r, h, w, etc.) will be
associated more closely at T2 with phoneme awareness than will T1 letter sound
knowledge for Category 1 and 2 letters, whose names have a regular structure.
H3: Levels of phonological awareness will also differentially predict letter sound
knowledge. Specifically, we expect rhyme awareness at T1 to predict T2 letter sound
knowledge for Category 1 letters (those whose names rhyme and share a regular
phonological structure) at T2, whereas deeper levels of phoneme awareness at T1 (i.e.
ability to manipulate phonemes) will predict the acquisition of letter sound knowledge at
T2 for letters in Category 3, with name-sound associations that do not follow any regular
phonological pattern.
H4: Directionality of the relationship between letter sound knowledge and
phonological awareness will vary depending on the level of phonological awareness
and type of letter sound knowledge. We expect that awareness of rhyme at T1 will
facilitate the learning of letter sounds at T2, especially letters with rhyming names in
which the onset contains the letter sound (Category 1). We also anticipate that deeper
levels of phoneme awareness at T2 will depend more on exposure to letter sound
knowledge at T1, especially for letters with more diverse letter sound associations
(Category 3), than will deeper levels of T1 phoneme awareness predict T2 Category 3
letter sounds.
Method
Participants
Included in the study were 66 monolingual (English-speaking) pre-school children (aged
4–6 years) attending daycare programmes in southern California. Participation required
parental consent in both phases of the study, and that the children themselves assented.
None of the children had any reported hearing or visual impairments. The study was
conducted in two phases: February/March (T1) and June/July (T2) of the school year.
None of the schools had formal reading instruction programmes. Descriptive statistics for
the sample at T1 and T2 are given in Table 2.
Materials
Phonological awareness
Rhyme awareness. The composite rhyme awareness score was derived by
summing the raw scores on two rhyming tasks developed from Foy and Mann (2001):
rhyme recognition and rhyme production (see Appendix A). In the rhyme recognition
task, adapted from Chaney (1992), children saw three pictured objects at a time, two of
which had names that rhymed. The examiner named the three objects, and pointed to
them. The children were asked to point to the pictures that ‘rhymed’ or ‘sounded almost
the same’. After demonstration and three practice trials, the children indicated their
LETTER KNOWLEDGE AND PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 147
rUnited Kingdom Literacy Association 2006
responses to eight trials by pointing. In the rhyme production task the children were asked
to say ‘what word rhymes with ___’ for five trials consisting of common words (e.g. hop).
Words and nonwords were scored as correct as long as they rhymed with the target word.
Phoneme awareness. The materials (see Appendix A), developed from Foy and
Mann (2001) consisted of practice trials and test items for each of six sub-tests assessing
phoneme judgement, phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution in both initial and final
positions. The sub-tests each consisted of two practice items and five test items. The tests
were administered in standard order: phoneme judgement, phoneme deletion and
phoneme substitution.
In the phoneme judgement tests, the children were told that ‘Morpo’, a Martian puppet,
wanted them to help him play ‘the sound game’. Following demonstration and practice,
the examiner presented a stimulus word, followed by two test words, and the children
responded with the word that started (initial) or ended (final) with the same sound as the
target word.
In the phoneme deletion tasks, the children were told that Morpo, the puppet, wanted to
see what happens to the words when the first (initial) or last (final) sound was taken out.
After demonstration and practice, the children responded by indicating how the word
would sound when the target sound was removed from each word. In the phoneme
Table 2. Descriptive statistics for the major variables for Time 1 and Time 2 testing (four months later).
Variable
Time 1 Time 2
t
a
Mean Standard
Deviation
Range Mean Standard
Deviation
Range
Age (months) 60.21 6.28 49–76 64.36 6.44 53–80 6.31
***
Digit span 2.62 1.61 0–7 3.09 1.59 0–6 2.08
*
Vocabulary 15.43 7.99 0–31 13.97 6.86 3–30 1.45
Reading 2.45 8.11 0–40 4.65 14.49 0–85 2.16
*
Phonological awareness
Phoneme judgement 3.50 2.92 0–10 5.15 2.21 0–10 4.69
***
Phoneme manipulation 1.21 2.47 0–19 1.39 2.89 0–19 1.94
*
Rhyme awareness 6.06 4.28 0–13 7.33 4.10 0–13 3.36
***
Letter knowledge
Names 27.38 19.40 0–52 30.30 20.85 0–52 2.25
*
Upper case 15.17 10.00 0–26 16.62 10.60 0–26 2.13
*
Lower case 12.48 9.67 0–26 14.26 10.35 0–26 2.56
*
Category 1 proportion 0.50 0.38 0–1 0.57 0.40 0–1 2.37
*
Category 2 proportion 0.53 0.39 0–1 0.59 0.41 0–1 2.12
*
Category 3 proportion 0.54 0.37 0–1 0.61 0.40 0–1 2.18
*
Sounds 14.37 18.30 0–52 21.75 32.76 0–52 2.12
*
Upper case 5.82 8.73 0–26 8.65 9.78 0–26 2.81
**
Lower case 5.27 8.30 0–25 7.41 9.99 0–26 2.16
*
Category 1 proportion 0.27 0.37 0–1 0.36 0.42 0–1 2.45
*
Category 2 proportion 0.21 0.33 0–1 0.30 0.39 0–1 2.43
*
Category 3 proportion 0.19 0.30 0–1 0.28 0.35 0–1 2.42
*
Notes:
*
po0.05;
**
po0.01;
***
po0.001.
a
Results of two-tailed dependent t-tests conducted on scores for Time 1 testing compared to Time 2 test scores.
148 FOY and MANN
rUnited Kingdom Literacy Association 2006
substitution tests, the children were told that the examiner liked the sound /k=/, and were
invited to ‘change the words from Morpo’s planet’ by changing the first (initial) or last
(final) sound to /k=/. Following demonstration and practice, the children responded by
changing the nonsense words into nonsense words that began (initial) or ended (final)
with /k=/.
Whereas phoneme judgement was considered a separate variable, the phoneme
deletion and phoneme substitution raw scores were combined to form one variable,
phoneme manipulation, by summing the number of correct scores on these two tests. This
strategy was prompted by factor analysis of a larger sample (at T1) from which the
present sample was taken. The results of this factor analysis, as detailed in Mann and Foy
(2003), suggested that phoneme deletion and substitution are highly interrelated skills
that are independent from phoneme judgement.
Vocabulary
The WPPSI Vocabulary sub-test (Wechsler, 1992) was used as a measure of expressive
vocabulary. In this test children are asked to give definitions for words of increasing
difficulty. It was included as a control for vocabulary expansion.
Letter knowledge
Letter name and letter sound knowledge were assessed with sub-tests of the Concepts
about Print Test (Clay, 1985). The naming test involves identification and naming of all
upper and lower case letters in fixed random order. Letter sound knowledge was assessed
by re-administering the letter stimuli and asking children to provide the sound associated
with each letter. For letters that represented more than one sound any appropriate
response was counted as correct, after Treiman and her colleagues (1998). The letter
identification and sound tasks were discontinued after eight consecutive failures, with the
exception of letters in the child’s first name, all of which were then tested.
The letter naming score reflects the summed scores on the letter identification tests for
upper and lower case letters. The letter sound score reflects the summed scores on the
letter sound tests for upper and lower case letters. Letter name knowledge was assessed
prior to letter sound knowledge, separated by two other tasks, as described in the
procedure.
Scoring by letter categories. Letter knowledge was categorised into three groups in
post hoc scoring (see Table 1) adapted from Treiman, Tincoff and Richmond-Welty
(1997).
Category 1 (the letters b, c, d, g, p, t, v, z) consists of regularly named letters whose
names all rhyme (i.e. share the same vocalic unit after the onset), share the phonological
structure of consonant 1/i/ and whose name contains the sound in the onset. Category 2
(the letters f, l, m, n, s, x) consists of letters whose names share the less common but still
regular phonological structure of /E/ 1consonant, and whose associated letter sound is
contained in the final phoneme of the letter name. We combined the inconsistently named
letters (a, e, i, o, u, q, y, h, r, w, j and k) into Category 3 (inconsistent phonological
structure). Category 3 letters do not share a common phonological structure. Because of
the disproportionate number of letters in the three categories, all analyses involving letter
categories were converted to ratio scores reflecting proportion of letters identified or letter
sounds known in each category to the number of letters in each category.
LETTER KNOWLEDGE AND PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 149
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Verbal short-term memory. The Digit Span sub-test of the WISC-R (Wechsler,
1974) provided a measure of verbal short-term memory.
Procedure
Participants were tested individually in quiet testing rooms on the school premises. They
were rewarded with stickers as needed to ensure maximal motivation and attention.
Testing was conducted in a fixed order in a session lasting approximately 30 minutes:
vocabulary, rhyme and phoneme awareness, letter names, word identification, word
attack, letter sounds and digit span. Testing for the second wave of tests was conducted in
the same way as for the first wave, four months later.
Results
Descriptive statistics for the major variables in this study are represented in Table 2. Time
1 and Time 2 represent the results for the first and second waves of testing, respectively.
Statistical analysis revealed that the mean time-related changes in all of the variables,
except for vocabulary, were statistically significant (two-tailed t-tests, po0.05). Zero-
order correlations between all of the major variables in the study are included in
Appendix B, and the most pertinent of these associations are discussed in detail in this
results section.
H1: Letter category analysis
We first examined letter sound knowledge as a function of phonological structure. We
had predicted that letter sound knowledge would be highest for letters whose names share
a regular phonological structure (Categories 1 and 2). In order to correct for the unequal
numbers of letters in each of the categories, proportion scores were used, as previously
described.
A two-way repeated measures ANOVA showed a main effect of testing time for letter
sounds, F(1,64) 56.42, MSe 50.14, p50.05, and letter category, F(1,64) 525.40,
MSe 50.02, p50.0001, but no significant interaction between these factors. The
children knew more letter sounds at Time 2 than at Time 1 (see Table 2). Post-hoc
Bonferroni tests (po0.001) showed that the children knew proportionally more letter
sounds for Category 1 (rhyming structure) letters than Category 2 (/E/1consonant
structure) and Category 3 (inconsistent phonological structure) letters.
3
H2: The letter sound categories will differentially predict phonological awareness
Partial correlations statistically controlling for the influence of age, digit span and
vocabulary knowledge on letter knowledge revealed that letter sound knowledge was
closely associated with our phonological measures, as expected (see Table 3).
We had hypothesised that phoneme judgement, phoneme manipulation and rhyme
awareness would be differentially associated with categories of letter sound knowledge.
Specifically we examined whether rhyme awareness would be more closely associated
with Category 1 letter sound knowledge than other letter sound knowledge, and whether
phoneme awareness would be more closely linked with Category 3 knowledge than for
other types of letter sound knowledge.
150 FOY and MANN
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Rhyme awareness
Zero-order correlations (as summarised in Table 3) showed that Category 1 (rhyme
structure) and Category 2 (/E/1consonant structure) letter sound knowledge at T1
significantly predicted rhyme awareness at T2. Dunn and Clark ztests
4
(Dunn & Clark,
1969; Steiger, 1980) revealed that these predictors were not significantly different in
predictive strength. When the effects of age, digit span and vocabulary were removed
using partial correlations, as shown in Table 3, Category 1 and 2 letter sounds no longer
significantly predicted rhyme awareness.
Phoneme judgement
The results of the zero-order correlations, as shown in Table 3, illustrate that only
Category 2 letter sounds (/E/1consonant structure) predicted phoneme judgement. Partial
Table 3. Zero-order and partial correlations
a
between letter sound categories and phonological awareness.
rpr
a
T2 Criterion variable: rhyme awareness
T1 Predictors
Category 1 sounds 0.26
*
0.07
Category 2 sounds 0.23
*
0.03
Category 3 sounds 0.21 0.01
T2 Criterion variable: phoneme judgement
T1 Predictors
Category 1 sounds 0.21 0.07
Category 2 sounds 0.25
*
0.11
Category 3 sounds 0.22 0.09
T2 Criterion variable: phoneme manipulation
T1 Predictors
Category 1 sounds 0.40
***
0.37
**
Category 2 sounds 0.40
***
0.37
**
Category 3 sounds 0.50
****
0.47
***
T2 Criterion variable: category 1 sounds
T1 Predictors
Rhyme awareness 0.42
***
0.28
*
Phoneme judgement 0.35
**
0.25
*
Phoneme manipulation 0.33
**
0.31
**
T2 Criterion variable: category 2 sounds
T1 Predictors
Rhyme awareness 0.42
***
0.26
*
Phoneme judgement 0.34
**
0.34
**
Phoneme manipulation 0.31
**
0.37
**
T2 Criterion variable: Category 3 sounds
T1 Predictors
Rhyme awareness 0.46
****
0.20
Phoneme judgement 0.33
**
0.33
**
Phoneme manipulation 0.31
**
0.41
****
Notes:
*
po0.05;
**
po0.01;
***
po0.001;
****
po0.0001.
a
Partial correlations reflect the correlations with T2 age, digit span and vocabulary controlled.
LETTER KNOWLEDGE AND PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 151
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correlations, removing the variance as a result of age, digit span and vocabulary, also
rendered this relationship non-significant.
Phoneme manipulation
In contrast, each of the three letter categories at Time 1 was significantly correlated with
phoneme manipulation, with the Category 3 letter sounds (inconsistent phonological
structure) a significantly better predictor of phoneme manipulation than Category 1 or 2
sounds (Dunn and Clark z
1
*
52.61, p50.01), a finding that was confirmed by the partial
correlations, as shown in Appendix C.
H3: Phonological awareness will differentially predict the letter sound categories
Zero-order correlations showed that our phonological awareness measures at Time 1
significantly predicted all of the letter sound categories at T2, as shown in Table 3 (and
Appendix B). Dunn and Clark z
1
*
tests revealed that there were no significant differences
in the predictive strength of these phonological awareness predictors for the letter sound
categories, nor for the partial correlations, which remained statistically significant except
for the relationship between Time 1 rhyme awareness and Time 2 Category 3 letter
sounds (inconsistent phonological structure).
H4: Directionality of the relationship between letter sound knowledge and phonological
awareness
In order to examine the directionality of the relationship between letter sound knowledge
and phonological awareness, we conducted cross-lagged correlation procedures at Time 1
and Time 2 using the partial correlations as the most stringent tests of our hypotheses.
The logic of the cross-lagged correlation procedure rests on the assumption that if X is
causally related to Y, then the association between X at Time 1 and Y at Time 2 should
be stronger than the relationship between Y at T1 and X at T2 (Kenny, 1975). The cross-
lagged procedure is widely used to explore predictive relationships in longitudinal
designs
5
(e.g. Gathercole, Willis, Emslie & Baddeley, 1992; Mann & Ditunno, 1990;
Schell, Marshall & Jaycox, 2004; Shahar & Davidson, 2003).
Examination of the bi-directional relationship between letter category knowledge and
our phonological awareness measures revealed (see Table 3) that the partial correlations
between Time 1 rhyme awareness and Time 2 Category 1 and 2 letter sound knowledge
(consistent phonological structure) were greater (statistically significant at po0.001) than
the converse (p40.05). When the variance resulting from age, digit span and vocabulary
was statistically controlled, Time 1 rhyme awareness was not significantly associated
with Time 2 Category 3 letter sounds. Similarly, the partial correlations between
phoneme judgement and the letter categories were greater (significant at po0.001) than
the converse (p40.05). In contrast, the association between phoneme manipulation and
all three letter sound categories appears to be reciprocal, since the relations are
statistically significant bi-directionally.
Discussion
In this short-term longitudinal study of pre-school children we sought to explore the
reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and letter knowledge that has
152 FOY and MANN
rUnited Kingdom Literacy Association 2006
been suggested by previous studies (e.g. Barron, 1998; Burgess & Lonigan, 1998; Perfetti
et al., 1987; Stanovich, 1986).
Our study replicates several previous findings. First, although we have not dwelled on
this fact, reading in our pre-school sample was associated with phoneme awareness and
letter knowledge, but not with rhyme awareness (see also Blaiklock, 2004; Hulme et al.,
2002; Muter & Diethelm, 2001; Muter, Hulme, Snowling & Taylor, 1998), as can be seen
in Appendices C and D. Second, as previously reported (Bowey, 1994; Bowey & Francis,
1991; Stahl & Murray, 1994; Stuart & Coltheart, 1988; Vellutino & Scanlon, 1987;
Wagner, Torgesen & Rashotte, 1994), letter knowledge (names and sounds) was linked
with phonological awareness but differentially for rhyme and phoneme awareness, as
shown in Appendix C. Third, we replicated the paradoxical finding of Treiman and
Kessler (2003) that letter names for letters that rhyme are learned less well than other
groups of letters, but that the letter sounds for these same letters are learned more easily
than the others. We showed that this relationship is stable at least for a short duration
(four months). We agree with Treiman and Kessler (2003); letter names that share
a common phonological structure (such as ‘b’ and ‘g’) may be more difficult to
differentiate from one another, and thus more difficult to learn. Indeed, Treiman and
Kessler (2003) showed that phonological similarity was inversely related to letter naming
accuracy. This common phonological structure may also make the letter sound
associations for letters that share the same phonological structure relatively easy for
children to learn compared to other letter sound associations (also see McBride-Chang,
1999; Treiman et al., 1997, 1998; Treiman & Kessler, 2003) by virtue of the fact that
the onsets of the letter sounds are contained within the onset of their associated letter
names. Letter name knowledge typically precedes letter sound knowledge in our literacy
culture and our data suggest that when it is combined with the ability to judge, substitute,
delete and otherwise manipulate phonemic structure, letter sound knowledge may more
readily ensue. It is consistent with this conjecture that letter name knowledge is a stronger
predictor of letter sound knowledge than vice versa (see Appendix B). One of the major
goals of the study was to investigate whether learning letter sounds for various categories
of letters would be differentially associated with phonological awareness, as Treiman
and her colleagues have suggested (Treiman et al., 1997). It was also important to
examine the nature of any relationship with respect to directionality. We wished to
explore the bi-directional relationships between letter knowledge and phonological
awareness that had been reported in several previous studies and replicated here, with an
eye to establishing which factors may drive the development of robust phonological
awareness skills.
We had predicted that there would be differences for rhyme awareness versus phoneme
awareness, with rhyme being less dependent upon literacy experiences (specifically the
learning of letter sound relationships). We also raised the expectation that learning letter
sound relationships would be more predictive of deeper levels of phoneme awareness
than of rhyme awareness which, in turn, would be more predictive of letter sounds
learning than vice versa. Our findings concur with our expectations in the first instance,
but not the second. We consider first the surprising finding that phoneme awareness as
well as rhyme awareness predicted letter sound knowledge for all categories. Being
endowed with rhyme awareness and with phoneme awareness (shallow and deep)
facilitated the children’s learning of letter sound relationships in all categories. The
conceptual knowledge underlying phonological awareness may conceivably help the
child to learn letter sound associations for all of the letter categories, regardless of
LETTER KNOWLEDGE AND PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 153
rUnited Kingdom Literacy Association 2006
the phonological structure of the letter name-sound relationship. Thus it appears that
phonological awareness skills are predictive of letter sound skills.
Our other hypothesis addressed the question of whether letter sound knowledge
facilitates the acquisition of deeper levels of phonological awareness. Our findings
suggest that letter sound skills do little to facilitate rhyme awareness or shallow levels of
phoneme awareness (phoneme judgement), especially when potential confounds such as
age, verbal short-term memory and vocabulary are controlled. Deeper levels of phoneme
awareness, however, appear to be strongly and independently linked to letter sound
knowledge in our study, consistent with findings in other studies (Blaiklock, 2004;
Carroll et al., 2003; Mann & Wimmer, 2002). We further show that although all letter
sound categories are predictive of phoneme manipulation, learning letter sound relation-
ships for Category 3 letters is especially helpful for developing deeper levels of phoneme
awareness.
Our results thus suggest a different pattern for deeper levels of phoneme awareness that
may require more explicit knowledge of phonemes. Although phoneme manipulation
is bi-directionally linked with letter knowledge, we have found strong evidence that
knowledge of the letter sounds associated with the idiosyncratically named letters in
Category 3 appears to facilitate performance in deletion and substitution tasks that
involve a deeper, more explicit level of phoneme awareness, independent of age, verbal
short-term memory and vocabulary. Thus while we support the contention of Treiman
and her colleagues (Treiman et al., 1997, 1998; Treiman & Kessler, 2003) that learning
letter sound correspondences will facilitate sensitivity to phonological structure, we add
the codicil that this occurs in different ways for rhyme, shallow and deeper levels of
awareness and for different sets of letters. All three aspects of phonological awareness
examined in the present study facilitated the learning of letter sound relationships four
months later. Likewise, learning all types of letter sound associations appeared to be
linked to the development of all aspects of phonological awareness but, for shallow levels
of phonological awareness, this relationship appeared to be dependent on develop-
mental factors such as age, verbal short-term memory and vocabulary. Knowledge of
diverse letter name-letter sound relationships was the strongest independent predictor of
deeper levels of phonological awareness.
In closing, we wish to make a cautionary reminder that although our statistical
procedures suggest directionality between letter sound knowledge and phonological
awareness, these findings do not indicate causality. Our proposition that learning arbitrary
letter sound relationships helps the pre-school child to develop explicit phoneme
awareness should be examined in an experimental design where children are taught
letters in certain orders. Such a design can also be used to test our view that pre-schoolers
with rhyme awareness and shallow levels of phoneme awareness will have an easier time
learning letter sound relationships dependent on regular phonological structures.
Notes
1. Treiman and Kessler (2003) also reported an effect of visual similarity on discriminability for lower case
letters. Phonological patterns, the main focus of the present study, affected both upper- and lower-case letter
naming in the Treiman and Kessler study. Thus, we have limited our analysis to the influence of phonological
patterns, whilst recognising the need for future research to examine the influence of such effects as visual
discriminability in letters on letter knowledge.
154 FOY and MANN
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2. The letter name for /z/ in American English rhymes with the other letters in this category, but not in British
English, in which the letter name is /zEd/, rhyming with the word ‘bed’.
3. A two-way repeated measures ANOVA on letter name knowledge revealed main effects of testing time,
F(1, 64) 55.86, MSe 50.005, po0.05 and letter category, F(1,64) 516.11, MSe 50.0006, po0.001.
Children were able to identify significantly more letter names at Time 2 than at Time 1. In contrast to the
children’s knowledge for letter sounds, post-hoc Bonferroni tests revealed that the children were able to
identify more names (see Table 2) for Category 3 letters (inconsistent phonological structure) than for
Category 2 letters (/E/1consonant structure) (po0.05) and Category 1 letters (rhyming structure; po0.001).
4. Recommended as one of the best procedures to use for evaluating the relative strength of dependent
correlations (Hittner, 2003).
5. For example, the cross-lagged correlation procedure allowed Gathercole and her colleagues to conclude that,
in 4–5-year-olds, phonological memory was influencing vocabulary acquisition to a greater extent than
vocabulary was contributing to the development of phonological memory because the correlation between
phonological memory at one testing time and vocabulary at the subsequent testing time was greater than the
converse.
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Appendix A
Materials used in the Phonological Awareness Tasks
(adapted from Foy and Mann, 2001)
Rhyme Awareness Tasks
Rhyme judgement instructions: ‘Now you will see 3 pictures. Point to the pictures that
sound almost the same. Tell me which two words rhyme. Let’s practise a few’.
Test stimuli
1. boat, moon, coat 2. duck, pear, bear
3. cat, rope, hat 4. bed, fish, dish
5. bowl, can, man 6. soup, ball, wall
7. plane, frog, train 8. three, tree, spoon
Rhyme production instructions: ‘Now tell me a word or a made-up word that rhymes with
some words. Let’s practise a few’.
Test stimuli
1. Hop 2. Bake
3. Red 4. Sand
5. Hill
Phoneme Judgement Tasks
Initial sound instructions: ‘I will say a word, like boat, and then I will say two more
words – bag and tag. Your job is to tell me which one, bag or tag, starts with the same
sound. Your answer should be bag because boat starts with b and so does bag. Let’s
practise a few’.
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Test stimuli
1. door date-wait 2. kite lap-cap
3. snap sun-net 4. feet wish-fish
5. fruit fan-sick
Final sound instructions: ‘Now let’s do the same thing for the final sound. First I will say
a word like black, and then I will say two more words – trick and trip. Which word ends
with the same sound as black? Now your answer should be trick. Let’s practise a few’.
Test stimuli
1. seed bed-bell 2. heart late-lake
3. rock fake-face 4. help rose-rope
5. safe hat-half
Phoneme Deletion
Initial phoneme instructions: ‘Now I want you to take the first sound out. First I will say a
word, like kiss. The first sound in kiss is k. So if we take out the first sound the word will
be iss. Do you understand? Let’s practise a few’.
1. top 2. doll
3. trip 4. food
5. clip
Final phoneme instructions: ‘Now I will ask you to take the last sound out. If I say a word
like soak, and we take the last sound out, the word that is left will be soa. Let’s practise a
few’.
1. pot 2. birth
3. card 4. shirt
5. teeth
Phoneme Substitution Tasks
Initial phoneme instructions: ‘Now I will ask you to change the first sound of a word to k.
If I say ped you will say ked. Let’s practise a few’.
Test stimuli
1. bip 2. teeg
3. plim 4. grat
5. pud
Final phoneme instructions: ‘Now I will ask you to change the last sound of a word to k.
If I say gleese you will say gleek. Let’s practise a few’.
1. mib 2. jeet
3. salp 4. mup
5. targ
LETTER KNOWLEDGE AND PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 159
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Appendix B
Correlations between Letter Knowledge and Phonological Awareness Measures for Time 1 and Time 2
123456789101112
Time 1
1. Reading –
Phoneme Awareness
2. Judgement 0.42
***
–
3. Manipulation 0.59
***
0.30
*
–
4. Rhyme 0.01 0.11 0.04 –
Letter Skills
5. Names 0.21 0.39
**
0.28
*
0.36
**
–
6. Sounds 0.36
**
0.31
**
0.44
***
0.27
*
0.66
***
–
Time 2
7. Reading 0.87
***
0.36
**
0.47
***
0.01 0.29
*
0.38
**
Phoneme Awareness
8. Judgement 0.14 0.41
**
0.21 0.17 0.26
*
0.22 0.21
9. Manipulation 0.06 0.31
**
0.97
***
0.08 0.29
*
0.46
**
0.44
***
0.24
10. Rhyme 0.56
***
0.24 0.07 0.75
**
0.35
**
0.24 0.06 0.17 0.11
Letter Skills
11. Names 0.12 0.31
*
0.31
*
0.46
***
0.86
***
0.58
***
0.18 0.24 0.30
*
0.48
***
12. Sounds 0.30
*
0.41
**
0.36
**
0.34
**
0.73
***
0.66
***
0.39
**
0.31
*
0.40
**
0.32
**
0.67
**
Notes:
*
po0.05;
**
po0.01;
***
po0.001.
160 FOY and MANN
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Appendix C
Zero-order and partial correlations
a
between letter knowledge and phonological
awareness
rpr
a
T2 Criterion variable: Rhyme Awareness
T1 Predictors
Letter sound knowledge 0.24
*
0.04
Letter name knowledge 0.02 0.20
Reading 0.04 0.06
T2 Criterion variable: Phoneme Judgement
T1 Predictors
Letter sound knowledge 0.22 0.09
Letter name knowledge 0.26
*
0.14
Reading 0.11 0.11
T2 Criterion variable: Phoneme manipulation
T1 Predictors
Letter sound knowledge 0.46
**
0.43
***
Letter name knowledge 0.30
*
0.26
*
Reading 0.49
***
0.55
***
T2 Criterion variable: Reading
Letter sound knowledge 0.44
**
0.49
***
Letter name knowledge 0.31
**
0.30
*
Rhyme Awareness 0.02 0.02
Phoneme Judgment 0.35
**
0.33
**
Phoneme Manipulation 0.49
***
0.55
***
T2 Criterion variable: Letter name knowledge
T1 Predictors
Rhyme Awareness 0.45
**
0.37
**
Phoneme Judgement 0.33
**
0.25
*
Phoneme Manipulation 0.32
**
0.30
*
Reading 0.21 0.22
T2 Criterion variable: letter sound knowledge
T1 Predictors
Rhyme Awareness 0.34
**
0.25
*
Phoneme Judgement 0.41
**
0.33
**
Phoneme Manipulation 0.36
**
0.38
**
Reading 0.38
**
0.38
**
T2 Criterion variable: reading
T1 Predictors
Notes:
*
po0.05;
**
po0.01;
***
po0.001.
a
Partial correlations reflect the correlations with T2 age, digit span and vocabulary controlled.
LETTER KNOWLEDGE AND PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT 161
rUnited Kingdom Literacy Association 2006
