Letter names, letter sounds and phonological awareness:an examination of kindergarten children across lettersand of letters across children

In this study 149 kindergarten children were assessed for knowledge of letter names and letter sounds, phonological awareness, and cognitive abilities. Through this it examined child and letter characteristics influencing the acquisition of alphabetic knowledge in a naturalistic context, the relationship between letter-sound knowledge and letter-name knowledge, and the prediction of Grade 1 phonological awareness and word identification from these variables. Knowledge of letter sounds was better for vowels and for letters with consonant–vowel names than for those with vowel–consonant names or names bearing little relationship to their sounds. However, there were anomalies within each category reflecting characteristics of the individual letters. Structural equation modelling showed that cognitive ability, comprising receptive vocabulary, non-verbal reasoning, rapid automatized naming of colours, and phonological memory significantly contributed to alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness. In turn, letter-name knowledge but not phonological awareness predicted letter-sound knowledge and subsequent reading skill.This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the first author. Thank you is extended to the participating schools and children and to Ian Newby-Clark for his orientation to AMOS. Michelle Bell, Shelly Moretti and Jodi Page have since graduated from the University of Guelph     

The second deficit: An investigation of the independence of phonological and naming-speed deficits in developmental dyslexia

An increasing body of dyslexia researchdemonstrates, in addition to phonologicaldeficits, a second core deficit in theprocesses underlying naming speed. Thehypothesized independence of phonologicalawareness and naming-speed variables inpredicting variance in three aspects of readingperformance was studied in a group of 144severely-impaired readers in Grades 2 and 3. Stepwise regression analyses were conducted onthese variables, controlling for the effects ofSES, age, and IQ. Results indicated thatphonological measures contribute more of thevariance to those aspects of reading skill thatinvolve decoding or word attack skills;naming-speed measures contribute more to skillsinvolved in word identification. Subtypeclassification findings were equally supportiveof the independence of the two deficits: 19%of the sample had single phonological deficits;15% had single naming-speed deficits; 60% had double-deficits; and 6% could not be classified. The implications of these findingsfor diagnosis and intervention are discussed.