Home Literacy and Phonological Awareness as Predictors of

A u t h o r

A b s t r a c t

T H E U C I U N D E R G R A D U A T E R E S E A R C H J O U R N A L

F a c u l t y M e n t o r

Key Terms

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♦ Digit Span♦ Phonological Awareness♦ Positive Home Reading

Environment♦ Socioeconomic Status

Sheela Shah became involvedwith research early in her careerat UCI. She was also presidentof the Psi Chi National HonorSociety and the Psychology Stu-dents Association. Shah�s study,which is based upon a pilot com-pleted during the previous year,was also presented at the UROPUndergraduate Research Sym-posium in the spring of 2000.Shah recommends that other un-dergraduates �start early� withresearch, as the benefits may in-clude grants, research opportu-nities, and will �ease the transi-tion to graduate school.� Shahhopes to continue her work in aPh.D. program in pyschology.

Phonological awareness is the ability to compare and manipulate small units ofsound within words and letters. Because the English alphabet is a phonological

system it may be essential to have a basic phonological awareness in order to read. Thisstudy investigated the relationships between phonological awareness, language-processingskills, and home environment in order to determine what factors predict young children�slater reading ability. It compared 45 kindergartners� home literacy environments (mea-sured through parental questionnaires) with their performance on phoneme awareness,letter/sound knowledge, and reading tests. Through data analysis, results from thedifferent tasks and the parental home literacy questionnaires were compared in order todetermine which factors influence young children�s reading ability. It was found thatletter-sound knowledge is a critical skill in attaining a better phonological awareness.Phonological awareness, in turn, is a critical skill in later reading ability. Also, positivehome environment (e.g. book exposure and parental teaching) was found to be signifi-cantly related to later reading ability.

Sheela Shah�s research on the role of home literacy environment inreading acquisition is truly cutting edge and has required mastery ofa large literature as well as development of innovative questionnairesand test materials to assess the behaviors of kindergarten childrenand their parents. Phoneme awareness, which is the ability to breakspoken words into letter-sized sounds (e.g. to realize that �cat� with-

out the first sound is �at� or to realize that �cat� and �cup� start with the same sound),is one of the most critical precursors of early reading ability. It is the skill that makesphonics possible, but it is also a skill that some children acquire much more easily thanothers do. The questions posed in this paper are directed at individual differences inphoneme awareness and Sheela�s work is very timely indeed. Her discovery is two-fold: 1) that letter-sound knowledge paves the way to phoneme awareness which inturns paves the way towards successful reading and 2) that parental efforts to create a�positive home reading environment� account for between 10 and 15 percent of thevariance in reading and pre-reading skills.

Home Literacy and PhonologicalAwareness as Predictorsof Reading Ability

Sheela ShahPsychology

Virginia MannSchool of Social Sciences

T h e U C I U n d e r g r a d u a t e R e s e a r c h J o u r n a l

HOME LITERACY AND PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS AS PREDICTORS OF READING ABILITY

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Introduction

English is a phonological writing system with an alphabetthat more or less represents the basic units of sounds that arecalled phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest units of soundwithin syllables and words. Phonological awareness is theawareness of these basic units of sound and is measured interms of the ability to compare and manipulate the units ofspeech within words and syllables. This measured ability tobreak down words into sounds is the first step in utilizing thealphabet; it assists children as they attempt to understand whatthe letters of the alphabet represent. In conjunction withphoneme awareness, factors of letter knowledge, short-termmemory, and home literacy may also be among the predic-tors of children�s early reading ability. Discovering whetherthis is indeed the case was the goal of this study.

Previous studies have found that tasks involving analyses ofphonemes were some of the most accurate predictors oflater reading development (Elbro, Borstrom and Petersen,1998; Mann, 1998; Wagner and Torgesen, 1987). Childrenwho performed better on these tasks also read at a higherlevel, emphasizing the importance of phonological aware-ness. Several important tasks that have been found to spe-cifically measure phonological awareness include tests ofrhyme detection, phoneme counting, and phoneme deletion.These tasks require children to distinguish among differentsounds and to manipulate those sounds.

Although some phonological awareness tasks employ writ-ten language materials and letter sounds such as �buh� or�guh,� many tasks assessing phonological awareness may alsobe used for younger pre-reading children. One study sug-gests that young preschool children can be tested for lowerlevels of phonological sensitivity using oral/auditory tasksbecause the performance on lower level tasks will be a pre-dictor of higher levels of phonological awareness in laterreading (Lonigan et al., 1998). Such tasks of phonologicalsensitivity require the child to distinguish among sounds anddemonstrate an overall sensitivity to speech sounds at varyinglevels, such as syllables, onset-rhymes and phonemes (pho-neme judgment tasks). Lonigan et al. used auditory languagetests of rhyme and alliteration to indicate that phonologicalsensitivity can indeed be accurately measured in children asyoung as three-years old (1998). Their results indicated thatthere was a substantial increase in the performance on thesephonological tasks between the ages of three and four, andthat scores on earlier tasks were predictive of scores on latertasks.

Past studies have linked phonological awareness with letterknowledge (Scarborough, 1989; Treiman et al., 1998). HollisScarborough found that deficient letter knowledge and poorperformance on productive vocabulary tasks were indica-tors of reading disability in dyslexic children (1989). Chil-dren who were later diagnosed with dyslexia didn�t performas well as other children on tests assessing letter knowledge,productive vocabulary, and phonological awareness. This re-search with dyslexics suggests that the skills related to phono-logical awareness are critical in learning to read. Treiman et al.studied the relationship between letter knowledge and per-formance on letter-sound tasks (1998). Their results showedthat children seem to use their knowledge of letter nameswhen learning sounds, rather than simply memorizing lettersand letter-sounds as random pairings. This further empha-sizes the importance of having sufficient knowledge of letternames for learning letter-sounds, and thus for normal read-ing acquisition.

Past studies also determined a strong relationship betweenshort-term memory and later reading ability (Brady, 1986;Mann, 1998). Susan Brady discussed a developmental studyin which a significant relationship is found between phoneticprocesses and verbal short-term memory, but no relation-ship is found between phonetic processes and nonverbal short-term memory (1986). Elbro et al. showed that phonologicalshort-term memory span in preschool children was also pre-dictive of later reading ability and that it actually contributedsignificantly to the prediction of dyslexia (1998). Anotherstudy used the Digit Span measure for short-term memory,and found that dyslexic and learning-disabled subjects hadpoorer phonological sensitivity and shorter digit spans(Ackerman, Dykman and Gardner, 1990).

Short-term memory may play a significant role in phono-logical awareness, and thus in later reading ability, because it isnecessary to have a store in memory where speech soundscan be held while other adjacent sounds are collected. Onceseveral sounds are held in memory, they can be separated orcompared to successfully solve phoneme awareness tasks.Those children who can hold more items in their short-termmemory store will also have a greater ability to manipulatethe units of sound needed for phonological awareness, andthus will later perform better in reading tasks. Additionally,an adequate memory store would enable proper retentionof words so that sentences can be semantically and syntacti-cally processed (Mann, 1998).

In the past, studies have successfully used many tasks to mea-sure phonological awareness, letter knowledge, working


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memory, and other language processing skills. When investi-gating the role of phonological awareness in reading, Loniganet al. found a significant difference in phonological awarenessamong children from different socioeconomic status classes(SES) with an overall lower performance in pre-reading tasksfor children in lower SES classes (1998). This difference inperformance for phonological awareness tasks for childrenfrom different SES classes was found for children as youngas three years old. It was further suggested that such a differ-ence might be attributed to differences in the type and fre-quency of exposure to home literacy-related activities. Con-sistent with this speculation, parents from a higher class arereported to spend more time reading to their children andmay also have more rhyme books, books of poems, andalphabet-related teaching materials (Stuart et al., 1998). Stuartet al. found that there was a specific social class difference inthe amount of time parents reported reading to their chil-dren. Lower SES adults may be infrequent or poor readersthemselves, and thus may read less to their children (1998).The greater number of resources in higher socioeconomichomes may help children develop a greater phonologicalknowledge because they will be exposed to books and othermaterials (e.g. computer games, videos, etc.) which empha-size learning letters and letter sounds (e.g. alphabet books).

If different home literacy environments are an explanationfor a difference in phonological awareness among childrenfrom various SES classes, it may be important to investigatethe role of home literacy in early reading. One importantcontribution of home environment is the amount of bookexposure that the child is given outside the classroom. Bookexposure may be something that could differ with socioeco-nomic class status because low SES parents may not have thetime or money to provide their children with as many literacymaterials as high SES parents. However, with simple self-reported parental questionnaires, it may be hard to deter-mine how much the child is truly exposed to literature due toinaccurate parental reporting. For this reason, the current studywill directly test the child�s book exposure through a title rec-ognition task (adapted from Schoenburg, 1998) in order todetermine the specific contribution of book exposure tochildren�s language processing skills, phonological awareness,and reading ability.

More generally, Fernandez-Fein and Baker looked at differ-ent home literacy activities and related them to children�s read-ing ability (1997). When assessing the influence of home en-vironment, word games such as nursery rhymes were signifi-cantly correlated with performance on rhyme tasks, showingthat word games at home may help children gain early pho-

nological awareness and thus aid them in an early start toreading. A strong correlation between letter knowledge andperformance on rhyme tests in their study further showedthe underlying phonemic connection between both these skills(Fernandez-Fein and Baker, 1997).

Although home literacy may play a large role in early readingability, simple exposure to print is not enough to make asignificant difference in later reading ability for children. Par-ents who offer corrective feedback and actively discuss let-ters and words with their children tend to improve theirchildren�s understanding of letters and sounds (Baker et al.,1998; Evans, Barraball and Eberle, 1998). Moreover, activeconversations regarding words during joint book readingmight prove beneficial later. If parents teach their youngchildren letter names and play language games dealing withphonological awareness, children may be more likely to laterexhibit a greater reading ability due to the early establishmentof a phonological foundation. Evans et al. asked specificquestions regarding parental views on what is important whenlearning to read (1998). Parents were asked to indicate howmuch they emphasize interest, vocabulary, sounding words,recognizing pictures, and other language skills. Some of thequestions dealing with parental teaching were adapted andexpanded in the present study�s home literacy questionnaire.

The present study further investigated the role of home lit-eracy in early reading ability and extended previous experi-ments by looking at different parental teaching types duringhome reading activities. Parental teaching has been shown toplay a role in children�s reading performance, but there is aneed for more research on what type of parental teaching ismost effective in promoting reading skills. This longitudinalstudy tested four and five-year-old pre-reading children withauditory tasks that measure low-level phonological sensitiv-ity, so that performance was within the capabilities of thechildren. Children were also assessed for pre-reading skillsusing established letter knowledge, rhyme recognition, andworking memory, as well as a measure of book exposure.Phonological awareness and the other language-processingtasks were given twice during the year, so improvement couldbe monitored and relationships among factors could be de-termined. The scores on these tests (as predictors of laterreading ability) were then compared to other factors (homeliteracy questionnaires and other language-processing tasks).

Parents of kindergarten children were asked specific ques-tions about home reading resources and literacy activities inorder to assess home literacy environment. The current studyadapted many of the questions pertaining to home literacy



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activities from a study that investigated the influences of thehome literacy environment on the development of oral andwritten language (Senechal et al., 1998). Specifically, ques-tions targeted how often parents read to their children, andhow often they facilitated other literacy activities such as li-brary visits, number of library books, etc. Questions wereexpanded and the scales were changed for a broader rangeof answer choices. This study built upon past studies byadding measures of frequency of home reading and overallexposure to reading at home. This longitudinal study at-tempted to show the relationships between letter knowledge,short-term memory, and phonological awareness and inves-tigate any causality between these different factors. It wasalso hypothesized that pre-reading children who have homeliteracy environments that emphasize learning letters andsounds will have a greater phonological awareness, and per-form at an overall greater level in the given language skilltasks than those children who do not.

Methods

ParticipantsForty-five kindergartners and their parents from two elemen-tary schools in Orange County were asked to participate inthe current study, and parents were asked to sign consentforms. Four and five-year old children who were nativespeakers of English were tested. Most of the children couldnot read at the time, or were just beginning to learn.

MaterialsHome Literacy QuestionnaireThe questionnaire consisted of a total of 17 questions. Ninequestions pertained to home reading activities, two pertainedto parental teaching, two were related to other educationalresources available in the home, and four questions askedparents about their child�s interest in reading and reading-related activities. Questions consisted of six or seven pointLikert scale questions and components, which asked the par-ents to rate their different teaching emphases from 1 to 10.

Phonological Awareness TasksThe two phonological awareness tests consisted of Phono-logical Judgement and Phoneme Deletion (Singson, 1999).The Phonological Judgement task required children to rec-ognize and distinguish between words that shared initial orfinal phonemes with a specific target word. An initial wordwas presented orally to the child and they were told to payattention to the first sound. Then a pair of words was pre-sented and the child was asked to repeat the word that startedwith the same first sound as the initial word. Two practice

sets were given to introduce the 20 initial phoneme judgmentpairs, and two practice sets were also given to introduce theten final phoneme judgment pairs. The Phoneme Deletiontask required children to say the remainder of a given wordafter taking the initial or final phoneme out. Two practiceitems were given before the set of ten initial phoneme dele-tions and two practice items were given before the set of tenfinal phoneme deletions.

Digit SpanThis test measures the maximum number of digits a childcan remember and recite (Weschler, 1967). It serves as ameasure of short-term memory. The Backwards Digit Spanwas also administered as another measure of memory.

Rhyme Recognition TaskBorrowed from Carolyn Chaney, this measure of phono-logical sensitivity was administered to measure children�s un-derstanding of rhyme (1998). Eight sets of three pictureswere presented one at a time. After the pictures were identi-fied, the child was told to point to the picture of the wordthat did not rhyme with the other two words.

Phonological RepresentationAs another measure of phonological sensitivity, this test(Elbro, 1998) was administered to test how quickly the childcould pull information from lexical store. Pictures of threeitems were presented on each of 15 note cards (e.g. one cardmight have pictures of a cow, pig and lamb).

Letter KnowledgeThe Woodcock Letter Identification task (Woodcock, 1987)and the Letter-Sound task (Schoenburg, 1998) were used tomeasure letter knowledge. In the Letter Identification task,children simply stated the name of each letter presented inthe booklet. Letters were uppercase, lowercase, and in cur-sive. A total of 45 letters were presented and the total num-ber correctly named was recorded. The Letter-Sound taskconsisted of several cards with single letters or pairs of let-ters where the child reported what sound each letter made(Schoenburg, 1998). A total of 20 cards were presented.

The Woodcock Word TestsThe Word Identification task (Woodcock, 1987) consistedof 150 real words in order of increasing difficulty. Childrenwere asked to read the first 25 words (grade 1.6 equivalent),until they missed five words in a row, then their score of thenumber correct was noted. The Woodcock Word Attacktask consisted of 50 nonsense words. Children were askedto read the first five words (grade 1.6 equivalent). This task


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was scored in the same manner as the Word Identification.Both tasks measured the child�s ability to decode words fromsounds, thus directly measuring reading ability.

Title Recognition TaskAs developed by Schoenburg, this test measures children�sstorybook exposure (1998). Children were shown 32 pic-tures taken directly from popular children�s books and wereasked to name the title of the book from which the picturecame.

ProcedureConsent forms were handed out to teachers several weeksprior to testing. Home questionnaires were then distributedto those parents who signed the consent forms. In this lon-gitudinal study, children were tested at two different times inthe year, once in early fall at the beginning of the school year,and once at the end of winter. Children were tested indi-vidually in their school for two sessions for approximately20 minutes each for the Fall testing (all measures) and 20minutes total for the Winter testing (phonological awarenesstasks, letter tasks, and reading tasks were administered again).In order to minimize fatigue effects, the Fall pre-reading taskswere not administered all at once, but instead were split intotwo sessions and given on two different days. In the courseof the testing, children were told that they could return totheir classrooms at any time if they became tired or if theyno longer wanted to participate. After each completed task,children were rewarded with stickers in order to encouragetheir best performance and further motivate them.

Results

The present study investigated language-processing skills aswell as factors in the home environment that may be relatedto and predict later reading skills. The mean values and theirstandard deviations are listed in Table 1. As would be ex-pected there are significant improvements in children�s per-formances with time for letter sound knowledge (t = -8.93,p<0.001), phonological awareness (t = -7.45, p<0.001), andreading ability (t = -5.07, p<0.001).

All the items in the Home Literacy Questionnaire were en-tered into a Principal Components factor analysis, which re-vealed five factors. The first and most important factor wasextracted with an eigenvalue of 5.06 which accounted for25.3% of the variance. This factor had high factor loadings(ranging from 0.601 and 0.770) from questions such as howoften parents taught their children to read words to the fre-quency of joint reading in the home. The factor variable is

referred to as �Positive Home Reading Environment� in allsubsequent analysis.

Cross lag correlations between some of the longitudinal datashow the predictability of various language-processing skillsand reading ability. The Fall Letter-Sound task correlates withthe Winter Phonological Awareness task more than the FallPhonological awareness task correlates with the Winter Let-ter-Sound task, indicating that letter-sound knowledge pre-cedes phonological awareness in early development. Anothersuch cross lag correlation suggests that phonological aware-ness is predictive of reading ability, with the Fall Phonologi-cal Awareness and Winter Reading task correlation beinggreater than the Fall Reading task and the Winter Phonologi-cal Awareness task correlation. These correlations suggestthat letter-sound knowledge is more predictive of phono-logical awareness while phonological awareness is more pre-dictive of reading ability.

Short-term memory as measured through the Digit Span taskcorrelated with several measures including the Winter Pho-nological Awareness task (r = 0.499, p<0.01) and the WinterReading task (r = 0.388, p<0.01), thus showing the impor-tant role of short-term memory in reading acquisition.

The factor scores of the Positive Home Reading Environ-ment factor were compared to the various language pro-cessing and reading tasks to determine the relationships be-tween home literacy and written language skills. Home envi-ronment positively correlated with several measures includ-ing the digit span test (r = 0.418, p<0.01), the title recognitiontask (r = 0.473, p<0.473), the letter sound task (fall: r = 0.333,p<0.05), the letter identification tasks (fall: r = 0.311, p<0.05and winter: r = 0.379, p<0.05), the phoneme awareness tests(fall: r = 0.366, p<0.05 and winter: r = 0.423, p<0.01) andthe winter reading task (r = 0.395, p<0.05). Thus it is likelythat parental involvement had a role in the children�s perfor-mance on the language-processing and reading tasks.

Another way of understanding the relationships between allthese variables is through the Stepwise Linear Regression.Further analyses with a Stepwise Linear Regression showedthe important links between letter-sound knowledge, pho-nological awareness, and reading ability. Notably, 55% of thevariance in the Winter Reading Ability could be attributed toFall Phonological Awareness while 11% of the variance couldbe attributed to Book Exposure (the Title Recognition Task).Since these results show the importance of phonologicalawareness in reading, a stepwise regression of Winter Pho-nological Awareness was also run. Results show that 52% of



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Task (n = 45) M SDAge (months) 64.60 3.96Digit Span 4.67 1.73Picture Naming Time (sec) 1.27 0.18Title Recognition Test (max = 32) 2.82 1.81Affect/Orientation (max = 16) 14.27 2.51

Fall TestingLetter Identification (max = 45) 20.31 9.87Letter Sound (max = 20) 10.02 6.36Rhyme Recognition (max = 8) 5.78 1.88Phoneme Judgment (max = 20) 18.80 4.62Phoneme Deletion (max = 10) 2.93 4.85Reading Assessment (max = 30) 3.00 7.57

Winter TestingLetter Identification (max = 45) 29.44 3.47Letter Sound (max = 20) 16.58 3.02Rhyme Recognition (max = 8) 7.02 1.27Phoneme Judgment (max = 20) 22.49 4.83Phoneme Deletion (max = 10) 7.53 6.95Reading Assessment (max = 30) 13.47 19.93

Home Literacy Questionnaire M SDAge began reading to child 2.30 1.47How often read ABC books 2.04 1.13How often teach child to read words 3.44 1.01Parental emphasis on developing broad 7.71 2.21

interestsParental emphasis on learning letters 8.53 2.43Parental emphasis on recognizing words 7.07 3.00

by sounding outParental emphasis on matching pictures 7.31 2.36

with wordsParental emphasis on recognizing words 6.68 2.97

after repeated practiceFrequency of reading with child at home 2.84 1.21How many books child has at home 4.53 1.42Visits to the library 2.11 0.98Frequency of child�s solitary reading 2.91 0.96Frequency that child asks to be read to 3.00 0.91Child reads other things: road signs, etc. 3.44 1.16How interested is child in reading 3.67 1.09How much time watching reading 2.96 0.98

television programsTime playing computer reading games 3.51 1.27Number of children�s magazine 1.64 0.8

subscriptionsFrequency of parental reading 2.69 0.95Parental interest in reading 3.84 1.07

Table 1Descriptive Statistics for all measures (test and questionnaire data)

the variance in Winter Phonological Awareness could be at-tributed to Fall Letter-Sound Knowledge, while 15% of thevariance could be attributed to �frequency of parental teach-ing.�

Discussion

The present study compared several language-processing skills,reading skills, and home literacy factors in order to deter-mine the factors related to and predictive of successful read-ing in children. As many others have shown, a variety offactors influence the difficult task of learning to read (Elbroet al., 1998; Lonigan et al., 1998; Mann, 1998; Wagner andTorgesen, 1987). All agree that phonological awareness playsa large role in predicting children�s later reading ability. Theresults of the present study support this notion. The rela-tionship between the Fall Phoneme test and the Winter Read-ing test is greater than the relationship between the Fall Read-

ing test and the Winter Phoneme test. This is consistent withthe idea that phonological awareness leads to increased read-ing ability. Also, because Fall phonological awareness con-tributed to over half of the variance in Winter Reading abil-ity in the Stepwise Regression, it is likely that phonologicalawareness is a critical skill that children must acquire in orderto read successfully.

Because phonological awareness is an accurate predictor ofreading ability, it is important to investigate the factors thatplay a role in developing phonological awareness. The re-sults of this study are consistent with past studies in showingthe importance of letter-sound knowledge as related to pho-nological awareness. Scarborough found that children whowere later diagnosed with dyslexia performed worse on spe-cific tasks of letter knowledge than normal readers, thus show-ing the importance of letter knowledge in successful reading(1989). As expected, the present study shows that letter-sound


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letters and words when learning to read later.

Along with relationships between language-processing andreading skills, the present study also found strong relation-ships between these skills and the positive home environ-ment factor extracted from the home literacy questionnaire.This factor consisted of several questions regarding frequencyof parental teaching in the home, children�s interest in read-ing, and the frequency of joint reading in the home. Loniganet al. found a difference in phonological awareness betweenchildren from different SES classes (1998). Children fromlower SES classes seemed to perform at a lower level in thephonological awareness tasks. As an explanation for thispossible discrepancy between children of different SES class,it was posited that home environment may have a stronginfluence in children�s reading acquisition.

The present study found that home environment is related tochildren�s performance on letter knowledge, letter-soundknowledge, title recognition (book exposure), phonologicalawareness, and reading tests. The Title Recognition task wasused to objectively test book exposure and the results fromthe study showed that the amount of book exposure a childpossessed strongly related to letter knowledge, letter-soundknowledge, phonological awareness, and reading ability.Parental teaching had a high-loading on the positive homeenvironment factor which, in turn, related to reading, pho-nological awareness, and other cognitive skills. Among otherthings, this supports the conclusion that children who weremost aware of phonemes had parents who reported activelyteaching their children to read words and know the alphabet.This further supports Baker et al. who argued for regularhome discussions of letters and words so children couldbetter understand letters and sounds (1998). Parental involve-ment does seem to play a role in children�s reading acquisi-tion because it can supplement and reinforce school educa-tion and allow pre-reading children to have the needed toolsfor an early start to reading.

Although the present study has shown several relationshipsbetween various language-processing tasks, positive homeenvironment, phonological awareness, and reading ability, itmay be important for future studies to choose a more di-verse sample of children from different SES classes. Thechildren in the present study came from different areas inOrange County but they were drawn from only two schools.Also, the present study did not record how many years ofprior schooling the children had before their first year ofkindergarten (e.g. preschool), but rather assumed that the chil-dren should be at about an equal level of instruction. This

knowledge has a strong positive relationship with children�sperformance on phonological awareness tasks, so that chil-dren who tend to know and understand more letter-soundrelationships also tend to perform better on tasks measuringphonological awareness. The cross lag correlations of thepresent study further support the importance of letter-soundknowledge. The relationship between the Fall letter-soundtask and the Winter phoneme awareness task is greater thanthe relationship between the Fall phoneme awareness taskand the Winter letter-sound task, suggesting that phonologi-cal awareness is linked to letter-sound knowledge. The re-sults from the Stepwise Linear Regressions further supportthis argument. Results show that letter-sound knowledgecontributes to 52% of the variance in phonological aware-ness, which in turn contributes to 55% of the variance in laterreading ability, thus indicating the importance of letter-soundknowledge in gaining phonological awareness and of havinga good phonological awareness in learning to read.

The present study also found the scores on the digit spanmemory task to have a strong positive correlation with thechildren�s phonological awareness and reading ability. This isconsistent with Elbro et al. who found phonological short-term memory span to be predictive of later reading ability,such that children with a greater short-term memory spanperformed better on later reading tasks (1998). As expected,the current study found that even the short-term memorycapacity for a string of digits, as measured by the digit spantask, significantly correlated with children�s performance inphonological awareness and reading tasks. This suggests that,in order to solve phoneme awareness tests and decode wordswhen attempting to read, children must have the capacity tostore words in their memory so that the sounds within thewords can be separated from each other.

Relationships between letter-sound knowledge, rhyme rec-ognition, short-term memory, and phonological awarenessseem to support the notion that all these elements are essen-tial for written language development. It is necessary to havethe basic knowledge of letters and the sounds they make inorder to recover the spoken words groups of letters repre-sent. Along with this phonological awareness, it seems cru-cial to have a large enough short-term memory capacity thatthese letter sounds can be held so they are ready to be blendedduring the actual reading process. It is also important torecognize the nature of sounds and be able to recognize similarand dissimilar sounds (as was measured through the rhymerecognition task) and apply them to reading words. Thesefactors interact with and contribute to a child�s phonologicalawareness, which enables the child to manipulate and control



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could have had some role in the children�s performance andshould be accounted for in future studies.

In conclusion, the relationships seen in the present study fur-ther support the phonetic approach to teaching children toread at school and home. It may be important to use letter-sounds and rhyming games to teach pre-readers the basicphonological skills necessary for reading. At an early age,children should be taught about letters and basic sounds sothey will have the skills needed for greater phonological aware-ness and thus a foundation for later reading. Such instructioncan take many forms, including letter-sound games and ac-tivities involving manipulations of sounds in words. For youngchildren, even a basic teaching of the alphabet can be benefi-cial.

The results of the present study also show that it is importantfor parents to play an active role in teaching their children athome and promoting an overall positive reading environ-ment. It is crucial for parents to teach their children basicskills such as letter knowledge (through the alphabet) and toplay language-based games at home. Parents should alsoread regularly to their children to both cultivate an interest inreading and provide experience with letter-sounds. With thisadded supplement to school instruction, children will havean advantage when they start to read. It is also reasonable tospeculate that the continuing development of alphabet soundbooks and reading-related computer games will expose morechildren to reading and promote further interest. Such mate-rials should be available in schools and libraries for thosefamilies who may not be able to afford these resources fortheir homes. Ideally, more parents and teachers will use pho-netic techniques and materials to develop a greater phono-logical awareness in pre-reading children, thus ultimately lead-ing to a greater advantage in reading acquisition for all chil-dren.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge my advisor and mentor Dr.Virginia Mann for her years of support and guidance. Othercognitive science faculty were also influential, including Dr.Christine Lofgren and Dr. Mary Louise Kean. I give specialthanks to Gina Rappleye for her editing and relentless sup-port, as well as the faculty and staff of Olivewood Elemen-tary and Greentree Elementary for their cooperation. Finally,I would like to acknowledge UROP for its support.

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Home Literacy and Phonological Awareness as Predictors of