Phonological awareness is an individual's awareness of the phonological structure, or sound structure, of words. Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability and therefore has been the focus of much research.
Overview Phonological awareness involves the detection and manipulation of sounds at three levels of sound structure: (1) syllables, (2) onsets and rimes, and (3) phonemes. Awareness of these sounds is demonstrated through a variety of tasks (see below). Available published tests of phonological awareness (for example PhAB2) are often used by teachers, psychologists and speech therapists to help understand difficulties in this aspect of language and literacy. Although the tasks vary, they share the basic requirement that some operation (e.g., identifying, comparing, separating, combining, generating) be performed on the sounds. It is assumed that the individual performing these tasks must have awareness of the units of sound in order to perform the operation. Phonological awareness is one component of a larger phonological processing system used for speaking and listening. Phonological awareness is different from other phonological abilities in that it is a metalinguistic skill, requiring conscious awareness and reflection on the structure of language. Other phonological abilities such as attending to speech, discriminating between sounds, and holding sounds in memory, can be performed without conscious reflection. However, these other phonological abilities are prerequisites to the development of phonological awareness. Therefore, general listening skills are often among those included in phonological awareness instruction. The terms phonemic awareness and phonics are often used interchangeably with phonological awareness. However, these terms have different meanings. Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness that focuses specifically on recognizing and manipulating phonemes, the smallest units of sound. Phonics requires students to know and match letters or letter patterns with sounds, learn the rules of spelling, and use this information to decode (read) and encode (write) words. Phonemic awareness relates only to speech sounds, not to alphabet letters or sound-spellings, so it is not necessary for students to have alphabet knowledge in order to develop a basic phonemic awareness of language. Phonological awareness tasks (adapted from Virginia Department of Education (1998): and Gillon (2004)
Listening skills
The ability to attend to and distinguish environmental and speech sounds from one another
Alertness: Awareness and localization of sounds Discrimination: Recognize same/different sounds Memory: Recollection of sounds and sound patterns Sequencing: Identify order of what was heard Figure-ground: Isolate one sound from background of other sounds Perception: Comprehension of sounds heard Syllable-structure awareness tasks
Syllable segmentation: e.g., "How many syllables (or parts) are in the word coffee?" Syllable completion: e.g., "Here is a picture of a rabbit. I'll say the first part of the word. Can you finish the word ra_____?" Syllable identity: e.g., "Which part of complete and compare sound the same?" Syllable deletion: e.g., "Say finish. Now say it again without the fin" Onset-rime awareness tasks
Spoken word recognition: e.g., "Do these words rhyme: shell bell?" Spoken rhyme detection or rhyme oddity task: e.g., "Which word does not rhyme: fish, dish, hook?" Spoken rhyme generation: e.g., "Tell me words that rhyme with bell." Onset-rime blending Phonemic awareness tasks
Alliteration awareness (a.k.a. phoneme detection and sound or phoneme categorization): e.g., "Which word has a different first sound: bed, bus, chair, ball?" Phoneme matching: e.g., "Which word begins with the same sound as bat: horn, bed, cup?" Phoneme isolation: e.g., "Tell me the sound you hear at the beginning of the word food" Phoneme completion: e.g., "Here is a picture of a watch. Finish the word for me: wa_____ " Phoneme blending with words or non-words: e.g., "What word do these sounds make: m...oo...n?" Phoneme deletion, also referred to as phoneme elision: e.g., "Say coat. Now say it again but don't say /k/" Phoneme segmentation with words or non-words: e.g., "How many sounds can you hear in the word it? Phoneme reversal: e.g., "Say na (as in nap). Now say na backwards" Phoneme manipulation: e.g., "Say dash. Now say it again, but instead of /æ/ say /I/" Spoonerism: e.g., felt made becomes melt fade
Development Although some two-year-old children demonstrate phonological awareness, for most children, phonological awareness appears in the third year, with accelerating growth through the fourth and fifth years. Phonological awareness skills develop in a predictable pattern similar across languages progressing from larger to smaller units of sound (that is, from words to syllables to onsets and syllable rimes to phonemes). Tasks used to demonstrate awareness of these sounds have their own developmental sequence. For example, tasks involving the detection of similar or dissimilar sounds (e.g., oddity tasks) are mastered before tasks requiring the manipulation of sounds (e.g., deletion tasks), and blending tasks are mastered before segmenting tasks. The acquisition of phonological awareness skills does not progress in a linear sequence; rather, children continue to refine skills they have acquired while they learn new skills. The development of phonological awareness is closely tied to overall language and speech development. Vocabulary size, as well as other measures of receptive and expressive semantics, syntax, and morphology, are consistent concurrent and longitudinal predictors of phonological awareness. Consistent with this finding, children with communication disorders often have poor phonological awareness. Phonological development and articulatory accuracy is often correlated to phonological awareness skills, both for children with typical speech and those with disordered speech. In addition to milestones of speech and language development, speech and language processing abilities are also related to phonological awareness: both speech perception and verbal short-term memory have been concurrently and predicatively correlated with phonological awareness abilities.
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