The development of epiphonological and metaphonological processing at the start of learning to read: A longitudinal study

The processes involved in the processing of phonological information (awareness and phonological recoding) now occupy a key position in the study of the acquisition of reading. The research performed in the field of learning to read have helped support the idea that the learning of writing is based on the ability to develop a phonological knowledge of the formal properties of the spoken language (Mattingly, 1972). Many studies have therefore been devoted to the relations between the learning of reading and phonological skills, that is to say the ability to perform a phonological analysis of spoken language. The present research concerns the development of the phonological skills both before and during the teaching of reading through the longitudinal study of children in their final year of nursery school (NS) and in first grade (FG).