The Nature of Phonological Processing and Its...

Psychological Bulletin1987, Vol. 101. No. 2, 192-212

Copyright 1987 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.0033-2909/87/S00.75

The Nature of Phonological Processing and Its Causal Role in theAcquisition of Reading Skills

Richard K. Wagner and Joseph K. TorgesenFlorida State University

Three bodies of research that have developed in relative isolation center on each of three kindsof phonological processing: phonological awareness, awareness of the sound structure of language;phonological receding in lexical access, receding written symbols into a sound-based representa-

tional system to get from the written word to its lexical referent; and phonetic receding in workingmemory, recoding written symbols into a sound-based representational system to maintain themefficiently in working memory. In this review we integrate these bodies of research and address theinterdependent issues of the nature of phonological abilities and their causal roles in the acquisitionof reading skills. Phonological ability seems to be general across tasks that purport to measure the

three kinds of phonological processing, and this generality apparently is independent of general cog-nitive ability. However, the generality of phonological ability is not complete, and there is an empiri-cal basis for distinguishing phonological awareness and phonetic recoding in working memory. Ourreview supports a causal role for phonological awareness in learning to read, and suggests the possibil-

ity of similar causal roles for phonological recoding in lexical access and phonetic recoding in work-ing memory. Most researchers have neglected the probable causal role of learning to read in thedevelopment of phonological skills. It is no longer enough to ask whether phonological skills play a

causal role in the acquisition of reading skills. The question now is which aspects of phonologicalprocessing (e.g., awareness, recoding in lexical access, recoding in working memory) are causallyrelated to which aspects of reading (e.g., word recognition, word analysis, sentence comprehension),

at which point in their codevelopment, and what are the directions of these causal relations?

Phonological processing refers to the use of phonological in-

formation (i.e., the sounds of one's language) in processing writ-

ten and oral language. In this article we consider the nature of

phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of

reading skills through an integration of three bodies of research

on phonological processing that have developed in relative isola-

tion.

At the core of the first body of research is the development of

phonological awareness, that is, one's awareness of and access

to the phonology of one's language (Mattingly, 1972).' Phono-

logical awareness is demonstrated by successful performance

on tasks such as tapping out the number of sounds in a word,

reversing the order of sounds in a word, and putting together

sounds presented in isolation to form a word (Lewkowicz,

1980). To an individual with well-developed phonological

awareness, our alphabetic system—which conveys language at

the phonological level—is a reasonable approach to visually

representing our spoken language. Conversely, an individual

lacking such awareness will find the correspondence between

symbol and sound capricious at best (see, e.g., Liberman, Ru-

bin, Duques, & Carlisle, in press, for a recent presentation of

this argument).

The helpful comments of Lynette Bradley, Peter Bryant, BobCrowder, Virginia Mann, Keith Stanovich, and an anonymous reviewer

are gratefully acknowledged.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Rich-

ard K. Wagner, Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tal-lahassee, Florida 32306.

At the core of the second body of research is phonological

recoding in lexical access, that is, getting from a written word

to its lexical referent by recoding the written symbols into a

sound-based representational system (Baron & Strawson, 1976;

Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, & Besner, 1977; Crowder, 1982;

Kleiman, 1975; Liberman & Mann, 1981;Martin, 1978; Meyer,

Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1974). Tasks commonly used to assess

phonological recoding for lexical access involve deciding

whether a string of letters represents a real word or a nonword,

and rapid naming of objects, colors, and other kinds of stimuli.

Whether getting from the written word to its lexical referent

necessarily involves speech-related processes has been hotly de-

bated (see, e.g., Crowder, 1982; McCusker, Hillinger, & Bias,

1981, for reviews of this literature). The consensus is that pho-

nological recoding is one of two basic means of lexical access,

the other being a more direct pairing up of the visual pattern

with its lexical referent. Whereas lexical access that does not

involve phonological recoding appears to be available to skilled

readers for high-frequency words, phonological recoding ap-

pears to be an important means of lexical access in the early

stages of acquiring reading skills, and useful even to highly

skilled readers for less familiar words (Baron, 1979; Doctor &

Coltheart, 1980;Ehri&Wilce, 1979; Stanovich, 1982a, 1982b).

At the core of the third body of research is phonetic recoding

to maintain information in working memory, that is, recoding

1 What we call phonological awareness is also referred to as linguisticawareness (Mattingly, 1980) and phonemic awareness (Lewkowicz,1980;Rozin&Gleitman, 1977).

192

PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSING AND READING 193

written symbols into a sound-based representational system

that enables them to be maintained efficiently in working mem-

ory during ongoing processing (Baddeley, 1982; Conrad, 1964;

Mattingly, 1980), Recent evidence suggests that the role of a

speech-based, short-term store in normal reading comprehen-

sion may be less important than was originally thought, because

a surprising degree of comprehension occurs so soon after read-

ing a word that efficient storage processes are not required (see

Crowder, 1982, for an introduction to this literature). However,

efficient phonetic coding may play a vital role for beginning

readers. The task faced by the beginning reader is to: (a) decode

a series of visually presented letters, (b) store the sounds of the

letters in a temporary store, and (c) blend the contents of the

temporary store to form words. Efficient phonetic coding for

storing the sounds of the letters enables the beginning reader

to devote the maximum amount of cognitive resources to the

difficult task of blending the sounds to form words (Baddeley,

1979,1982; Torgesen, Kistner, & Morgan, in press).

This article is not intended to be an exhaustive review of

three mature areas of research. For one thing, the length of such

a review would be prohibitive. For another, adequate reviews of

these separate literatures are available (see, e.g., Crowder, 1982;

Kleiman, 1975; Liberman et al., in press; Mann, 1985; Mc-

Cusker et al., 1981). Rather, our purpose is to provide a coher-

ent account, spanning the three major areas of research, of pho-

nological processing as it relates specifically to the acquisition of

reading skills. Further, we focus on the causal status of relations

between phonological abilities and the acquisition of reading

skills.

Careful evaluation of causal relations between phonological

processing and the acquisition of reading skills is especially im-

portant because the development of many cognitive skills and

the acquisition of reading usually proceed hand in hand. Thus,

it is difficult to distinguish cognitive skills that play a causal role

in the acquisition of reading skill from those that are primarily

by-products of learning to read. Ehri (1979) has distinguished

four possible relations between phonological abilities and read-

ing. First, a particular phonological ability can be a prerequisite

of reading, without which the acquisition of reading skills is

severely limited. Second, a particular phonological ability can

act as a facilitator, in which case children with the ability ac-

quire reading skills faster than those without it. Third, a partic-

ular phonological ability can be a consequence of learning to

read, and thus a by-product rather than a cause of the acquisi-

tion of reading skills. Finally, a phonological ability might be a

correlate of reading ability, that is, related to the acquisition

of reading skill only via their shared relation with some third

variable, such as IQ.

There are at least three major approaches to investigating the

causal status of relations between phonological processing and

the acquisition of reading skills, each of which has limitations

when used alone. The first approach is to study individuals for

whom the usual hand-in-hand development of phonological

processes and reading does not occur (i.e., individuals for whom

the acquisition of reading skills is particularly difficult; see Sta-

novich, 1982a, 1982b; Wagner, 1986b, for reviews of this litera-

ture). A number of difficulties are associated with this ap-

proach. For example, if reading disabled students or adult illit-

erates show marked deficiencies in some aspect of phonological

processing, it is not easy to determine whether their deficiency

in phonological processing caused their reading difficulties or is

merely a by-product of their lack of reading skills. Most investi-

gations of the deficiencies of reading disabled children in pho-

nological processing do not inform us about causal relations

between phonological processing deficiencies and reading disa-

bilities. In this article we examine two other approaches to de-

termining causal relations between phonological processing

and the acquisition of reading skills: longitudinal correlational

studies and experimental studies.

Longitudinal correlational studies involve obtaining mea-

sures of phonological processing and reading at several points

in time, and then testing alternative models of causal relations

by the fit of the models to the obtained covariances among mea-

sures (see, e.g., Kenny, 1979; Long, 1983a, 1983b, for introduc-

tions to causal modeling). Causal inferences can be drawn from

such studies to the extent one assumes that all relevant variables

that might be causally related to both phonological processing

and reading are included in the model. This assumption relates

to the "third variable" problem: A correlation between two ob-

served variables may derive from their relations to an unmeas-

ured third variable. One can never be sure about the extent to

which this assumption is violated, but in practice, the longitudi-

nal correlational approach yields valuable information about

causal relations between phonological processing and reading.

Experimental studies are attempts to manipulate either pho-

nological or reading skills, usually by providing a training pro-

gram for the targeted skill. Whereas the experimental approach

offers more protection against the third variable problem than

the longitudinal correlational approach, the problem is not

eliminated. The experimental approach assumes that one's ma-

nipulation or training directly affects the targeted independent

variable and not another unobserved variable. Other limita-

tions are associated with using training studies to experimen-

tally manipulate phonological processing abilities and reading

skill (see, e.g., Sternberg, 1983). For example, it could be the

case that phonological awareness plays a causal role in learning

to read but that phonological awareness cannot be trained, at

least with the specific training program used. Conversely, train-

ing effects can be obtained even when the targeted ability has

not been affected by training, especially when the training activ-

ities and the criterion share task characteristics (e.g., both are

based on speed, both are presented on microcomputers) in ad-

dition to their both being measures of the targeted ability.

No approach by itself can definitively answer all the questions

about causal relations between phonological processing and the

acquisition of reading skill. Yet although each approach has its

limitations, the limitations are to some degree complementary

and thus tend to cancel out when the approaches are combined

(Bradley & Bryant, 1985). This is why we are especially inter-

ested in results supported by both longitudinal correlational

and experimental methods.

This article is divided into six parts. The first part is a brief

introductory overview of the phonological nature of reading.

This sets the stage for the parts that follow by clarifying (a) the

definitions we have adopted, for purposes of the present discus-

sion, for the set of highly confusable terms that make it difficult

for interested observers to follow developments in the area of

phonological processing; and (b) our assumptions about the

194 RICHARD K. WAGNER AND JOSEPH K. TORGESEN

level of language conveyed by the printed word. In the second

through fourth parts, we consider relations between the acquisi-

tion of reading skills and phonological awareness, phonological

receding for lexical access, and phonetic receding to maintain

information in working memory, respectively. Each of these

three parts contains sections in which we examine longitudinal

correlational studies and experimental studies that focus on

causal relations between phonological processing and reading.

Because the literatures we review are mature, replete with stud-

ies that, on their face, support all possible positions, our exami-

nation of these studies is more fine-grained than is normal for

reviews of this sort. In several cases we have reanalyzed the orig-

inal data. In the fifth part of the article, we explicitly consider

hypotheses about the nature of phonological processing that

emerge from examining interrelations among measures of

different kinds of phonological processing. In the last part, we

summarize the major empirical findings from our review, iden-

tify gaps in current knowledge and issues still to be resolved,

and propose how the gaps in current knowledge and unresolved

issues can be addressed in future research.

Overview: The Phonological Nature of Reading2

We begin this overview by summarizing our use of the easily

confused terms adopted in studies of phonological processing,

and then we briefly discuss the level of language represented

by our alphabet and orthography. Our presentation, which is

intended to be modal rather than original, highlights conven-

tional thought on the phonological nature of reading. However,

many points are at issue about how language is represented in

writing, and we sidestep the hot debates only because they are

of secondary interest to our purpose.

Phones, Phonemes, and Phonetics

Exasperated readers of the phonological processing literature

who get lost in terminology are justified in exclaiming, "It's all

Greek to me!" Many of the commonly used (and easily con-

fused) terms derive from the Greek word phone, which trans-

lates into "sound" or "voice."

At its most basic level, speech consists of continuously vari-

able waves of acoustic energy. Spectrographic analysis of the

speech stream has shown, for the most part, none of the seg-

mentation we perceive when, for example, we hear three sounds

in the word "cat" (Gleitman & Rozin, 1977). The apparent seg-

mentation of the speech stream is a cognitive/perceptual phe-

nomenon, not a characteristic of the acoustic stimulus itself.

One step removed from the acoustic stimulus is the phonetic

level. Speech is represented at the phonetic level by phones,

which are the exhaustive set of speech sounds. An example of a

phone is the sound of the letter "t" in the word "ten." Letters

are associated with more than one phone. For example, the

sound of the letter "t" in the word "stop" is a different phone

than "t" in "ten." The relations between phones and the acous-

tic waves from which they are perceived are complex and not

well understood. A mapping occurs between parts of the speech

wave and individual phones for some types of phones (e.g., non-

diphthongized vowels, e.g., the sound of the "a" in "wave").

However, for other types of phones, what we perceive from a

part of the speech wave depends on the characteristics of the

preceding and succeeding speech sounds (Gleitman & Rozin,

1977).

Although the sound of the letter "t" is different in the words

"ten" and "stop," such differences are not perceived in everyday

speech. The perceived sound distinctions are referred to as pho-

nemes. A phoneme consists of a group of phones that speakers

of a language consider to be variations on the same sound (Bal-

muth, 1982). The individual phones that make up a phoneme

are referred to as ollophones of that phoneme. For example, the

sounds of the letter "t" in the words "ten," "stop," "matter,"

and "bit" are allophones of the English consonant phoneme

/t/, and the sounds of the letter "i" in the words "bite," "hide,"

and "tile" are allophones of the English vowel phoneme /ai/.

Midwestern spoken English can be represented by a total of 45

phonemes (16 vowel phonemes and 29 consonant phonemes;

Denes & Pinson, 1963).

Phonemes represent language at the phonological level. Two

additional terms are commonly used in reference to this level

of language. The first, morphophoneme, aptly conveys the no-

tion that meaning (morpho) as well as sound (phoneme) is rep-

resented by our writing system and orthography. The second

term, used interchangeably with the first, is systematic pho-

neme. This term derives from Chomsky and Halle's (1968)

analysis of the phonology of English. On their view, our knowl-

edge about words is represented in our lexicons by abstract

strings of systematic phonemes. What is systematic or abstract

about this representation is that families of words that are re-

lated by meaning (e.g., heal, health, healthy) share one lexical

entry: /hel/. The spelling of the lexical entry /hel/ is to some

degree informative about its sound. Speech involves using pho-

nological rules (e.g., the vowel shift rule responsible for the

change in pronunciation of the second "e" in the word "extrem-

ity," compared to its pronunciation without the suffix in the

word "extreme") to transform the abstract phonemes into sur-

face phones that, in turn, relate to the articulatory gestures we

know as speech.

The syllable, which is the smallest independently articulable

segment of speech, is yet another unit of speech segmentation.

Vowels are produced when the vocal tract is open and the vocal

folds are vibrating. Consonants are produced by constricting

the vocal tract. The alternate opening and closing of the vocal

tract roughly corresponds to a syllable, but it is often difficult to

determine the precise beginning and end of a syllable (Balmuth,

1982).

It bears repeating that there is considerable debate about the

specific nature of phones, phonemes, and syllables. The some-

what simplistic picture we have presented is intended to make

it easier for the reader to follow the ensuing discussions. The

issues under debate are by no means trivial, and their resolution

will be consequential to our understanding of relations between

phonological processing and reading.

2 In this overview of the phonological nature of reading, we have re-lied heavily on Balmuth (1982), Crowder (1982), and Gleitman andRozin (1977). The interested reader is encouraged to consult these veryuseful sources.


Representing Spoken Language With Our

Alphabetic Writing System

There are two common fallacies about how language is repre-

sented by our alphabetic writing system and our English orthog-

raphy (the spelling conventions within our alphabetic writing

system). The first fallacy is the commonsense yet oversimplified

notion that writing is just the visual expression of language.

What is fallacious about this idea is that there is great variety

in the aspects of a language that a writing system might convey,

ranging from levels close to the sound to levels close to the

meaning (Crowder, 1982). Writing might represent articulatory

gestures—with symbols corresponding to articulatory gestures,

such as pressing one's tongue to the roof of one's mouth. Alter-

natively, writing might represent concepts such as "middle" in

a logographic fashion (e.g., the symbols ":!:") that conveys no

information about pronunciation. The second fallacy is that

English is a phonetic orthography, in which letters represent

speech sounds. If English were truly a phonetic orthography, the

pronunciation of the sequence of letters "heal" would be the

same for the words heal and healthy, and words such as sword

and knee would not exist at all!

Most researchers believe that our writing system represents

language at the phonological level. When language is repre-

sented at the phonological level, writing is related to the sound

of a word being represented but with compromises that some-

times reflect a word's meaning (Crowder, 1982). Consider the

previously mentioned example of heal and health. The letters

roughly correspond to the sounds of the words—one would not

pronounce either of the words as banana, for example—yet

their spelling provides no clue that the first parts of the words

are pronounced differently. Thus, the relation between the letter

group "heal" and its pronunciation is compromised because the

very same letter group is pronounced differently in the words

heal and health, and this compromise reflects the words' shared

root meaning.

An alphabetic orthography such as ours, that represents lan-

guage at the phonological level, is an optimal system of repre-

sentation if we assume that lexical entries consist of strings of

systematic phonemes. The optimal nature of our alphabetic or-

thography refers to the notion that our writing system repre-

sents words in terms of the same units (systematic phonemes)

by which words are represented in our lexicon.3

With this background, we are ready to consider the role of

phonological awareness in learning to read. The beginning

reader really has two basic things to learn: Printed symbols rep-

resent units of speech, and the unit of speech represented is

the phoneme (Crowder, 1982). Learning that printed symbols

represent units of speech is fairly trivial. Even severely disabled

readers can learn to read sentences in which words are repre-

sented as Chinese ideographs (Rozin, Poritzky, & Sotsky, 1971).

What is difficult is learning that printed symbols represent sys-

tematic phonemes, that is, becoming aware of the phonological

nature of our language.

Phonological Awareness and the Acquisition

of Reading Skill

Proponents of the view that phonological awareness is vital

to the acquisition of reading skill argue that an individual with

phonological awareness has a number of advantages over an in-

dividual without it in learning to read. First, an individual with

phonological awareness is likely to view our alphabetic orthog-

raphy as a sensible way of representing her language. Otherwise,

the patterns of letter-sound correspondences will seem strange

and arbitrary (Mattingly, 1980). Second, it is argued that learn-

ing to read new words involves segmenting the letter string into

units that correspond to individual sounds (phonemes) and

blending the individual sounds together to pronounce the word.

The point of this argument is that an awareness of phonemes is

a prerequisite of the ability to segment letter strings into pho-

neme-based units and to blend the resulting phonemes into

words.

The acquisition of reading skill might also affect the subse-

quent development of phonological awareness. The argument is

that learning to read provides explicit knowledge of the phono-

logical structure of language that complements the largely tacit

knowledge acquired from experience at listening and speaking.

The analogy of learning a foreign language may help clarify this

point. Learning a foreign language typically requires consider-

able effort at mastering grammatical rules that a native speaker

of the language takes for granted. Individuals sometimes report

that learning the grammatical rules of a foreign language made

them aware of grammatical rules of their own language, rules

they previously were not aware of yet that guided their speech

and writing nevertheless.

Relations Between Phonological Awareness and Reading

Phonological awareness develops at about the age children are

taught to read. Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, and Carter

(1974) examined the ability of 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds to seg-

ment words by phonemes and syllables. None of the 4-year-olds

could segment by phoneme, but half could segment by syllable.

Only 17% of the 5-year-olds could segment by phoneme, and

again half could segment by syllable. By age 6, 70% could seg-

ment by phoneme and 90% by syllable. Similar results were re-

ported by Calfee, Chapman, and Venezky (1972), who asked

5'/2-year-old children (a) whether two words sounded the same

at the end, and (b) to provide a word that rhymes with a pre-

sented word. Even after practice trials with corrective feedback,

children responded at chance levels in saying whether two words

sounded the same at the end. The children were able to produce

a rhyming word 39% of the time, an average that resulted from

a mix of some children doing very well at the task and some

doing very poorly, with few in between. Further, success at pro-

ducing words that rhymed was related to success at early

reading.

Whether or not a young child demonstrates phonological

awareness may depend critically on the nature of the task used.

Fox and Routh (1975) found some evidence that phonological

awareness may occur earlier than the age at which reading is

taught. They had 3- to 6-year-olds listen to monosyllabic words,

and asked the children to say "just a little bit" of the word. Even

3 Our orthography cannot be truly optimal, because it containsanomalies (e.g., sword) whose spellings are not informative about theirmeanings.


the 3-year-olds could segment at least some words into their be-

ginning and remaining sounds, and by age 5, children could

segment first and remaining sounds for over half of the words.

Strong relations have been reported between performance on

various measures of phonological awareness and reading skill.

In a large-scale investigation, Calfee, Lindamood, and Linda-

mood (1973) gave the Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization

Test (Lindamood & Lindamood, 1971) and the Wide Range

Achievement Test (1978) to 660 students from kindergarten

through Grade 12. The Lindamood Auditory Conceptualiza-

tion Test uses colored blocks to represent sound sequences in

wordlike units. For example, the unit sas could be represented

with two blocks of one color and one block of another color by

placing the different-colored block between the pair of same-

colored blocks. Multiple correlations between reading and

spelling composite scores and the score on the Auditory Con-

ceptualization Test were .7 or higher at each grade level. How-

ever, the magnitude of the multiple correlations may overesti-

mate the true degree of relation between phonological aware-

ness and reading because IQ was not partialed out.

Rosner and Simon (1971) did control for IQ in a study of

relations between the ability to say a word without one of its

sounds and scores on the Stanford Achievement Test (1982).

Subjects in this study were 284 students from kindergarten

through the sixth grade. Partial correlations between their mea-

sure of phonological awareness and the achievement test scores

ranged from . 1 to .7, with a median of .5. The only nonsignifi-

cant partial correlation (.1) was obtained for the sixth-grade

sample. Similar relations have been found between reading

achievement and a variety of measures of phonological aware-

ness (see, e.g., Fox & Routh, 1975; Helfgott, 1976; Liberman,

1973; Zifcak, 1981).

Having observed that the development of phonological

awareness coincides roughly with learning to read, and that

measures of phonological awareness are related to measures of

reading ability, we need to consider the causal status of whatever

relations may exist between phonological awareness and read-

ing. Before examining the longitudinal correlational studies and

the training studies that have been done, we briefly consider

three studies of individuals with atypical developmental courses

that avoid some of the previously mentioned limitations associ-

ated with this approach.

Morais, Gary, Alegria, and Bertelson (1979) examined the

causal status of the relation between phonological awareness

and the acquisition of reading skill by studying individuals who

had not received training in reading. Morais et al. presented

illiterate Portuguese adults from an agricultural community

tasks such as saying words and nonwords without one of their

sounds (e.g., burn-urn), adding sounds to words and nonwords

(ant-pant), reversing the order of sounds in words (bat-tab),

and reversing the order of syllables in words (packrat-ratpack).

Half of the illiterate subjects failed every test, whereas every

individual in a literate control group whose members learned

to read as adults passed at least one test. Percentages of correct

responses for illiterates on the deleting sounds task were 26%

for words and 19% for nonwords, compared with 87% and 73%,

respectively, for the literate control subjects. Percentages of cor-

rect responses for illiterates on the adding sounds task were 46%

for words and 19% for nonwords, compared with 91% and 71%,

respectively, for the literate controls. Finally, the illiterates re-

versed the order of sounds in words correctly only 9% of the

time, but were able to reverse the order of syllables in words

48% of the time. These results led Morais et al. to conclude that

phonological awareness does not arise automatically without

learning to read an alphabetic orthography.

One limitation of Morais et al.'s study is a general limitation

of all research on atypical subjects: The results may apply only

to the atypical individuals studied, in this case, Portuguese illit-

erates. However, other investigators have recently replicated and

extended this finding to groups of adult poor readers. Liberman

et al. (in press) measured the phonological awareness of a group

of adult poor readers who attended a community literacy class.

On a first-grade level phonological awareness task that simply

required identifying initial, medial, and final sounds in words,

errors were made on over 40% of the items. Similar results have

been reported by Byrne and Ledez (1983) and by Marcel

(1980). However, there is an important difference between

Morais et al.'s study of Portuguese illiterates and these other

studies in terms of causal implications. We might assume that

the Portuguese illiterates could not read because they were not

taught how, and thus conclude that deficiencies in phonological

awareness resulted from a lack of reading instruction rather

than from deficiencies in phonological abilities. In contrast, the

reading problems of more typical adult poor readers may result

from deficiencies in phonological abilities, deficiencies in in-

struction, or some combination of the two.

A final example of research using atypical subjects to investi-

gate causal relations between phonological awareness and the

acquisition of reading skill was reported by Bradley and Bryant

(1978). They compared the performance of an older group of

poor readers on measures of phonological awareness to a youn-

ger group of normal readers that matched the older group in

reading level. They assumed that the older poor readers should

have experienced at least as much reading instruction and prac-

tice as the younger normal readers, if not more. Thus, any defi-

ciencies in phonological awareness for the older disabled readers

could not be due to a lack of practice at reading. Two tasks were

used to measure phonological awareness. The first required sub-

jects to identify which of four words lacked a sound shared by

the other three words (e.g., sun, sea, sock, rag). The older disa-

bled readers performed more poorly on this task than the youn-

ger normal readers. The second task was to provide a word that

rhymed with a target word. Again, the older disabled readers

performed more poorly than the younger normal readers. Brad-

ley and Bryant concluded that one aspect of phonological

awareness—sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration—was a possi-

ble cause of reading difficulties.

Longitudinal Correlational Studies

The maximally informative longitudinal correlational study

of phonological awareness and reading would consist of mea-

surements, on at least three occasions, of reading skill, phono-

logical awareness, and IQ for a large group of children. Ideally,

the first occasion should occur before the children had learned

to read (e.g., preschool or beginning kindergarten levels), in

which case the reading measure should be a brief assessment to

document that the children were indeed nonreaders. The sec-


ond occasion should occur at the very early stage of readingacquisition (e.g., first-grade level), and the third at a later stageof reading acquisition (e.g., second-grade level).

Support for phonological awareness as a determinant of suc-cess at early reading would be provided by finding that the pho-nological awareness of prereaders predicted their subsequentsuccess at reading, provided adequate attention is given to otherfactors, such as IQ, that might be responsible for the predictiverelation. Conversely, support for practice at reading as a deter-minant of phonological awareness would be provided by findingthat success at early reading predicted subsequent performanceon measures of phonological awareness, again provided ade-quate attention is paid to plausible third causes. Models posit-ing reciprocal causal relations, or no causal relations whatso-ever, could also be examined.

We know of no study that has incorporated the complete de-sign for a longitudinal correlational study of relations betweenphonological awareness and reading just outlined. However, anumber of studies have incorporated parts of the design, andwe consider them next.

Mann and Liberman (1984) conducted a longitudinal studyof phonological awareness, short-term memory, and reading for62 children. We focus here on the results relating phonologicalawareness to reading. Phonological awareness was assessed inMay of their kindergarten year with a syllable segmentation taskthat required the children to tap out the number of syllables inwords they listened to. Reading achievement was assessed 1year later.

The obtained correlation between kindergarten syllable seg-mentation and reading achievement 1 year later (r = .40, p <

.01) is consistent with the view that phonological awareness iscausally related to reading. However, there are at least two plau-sible alternative accounts of the relation between phonologicalawareness and the acquisition of reading skills to consider. Thefirst is that the relation between syllable segmenting and laterreading achievement is indirect, resulting from both variablesbeing related to IQ. This account is implausible because thepartial correlation, with IQ held constant, between syllable seg-mentation and later reading was identical to the simple correla-tion of .40. The second alternative account is that the causalrelation is reciprocal, that is, that learning to read plays a causalrole in subsequent phonological awareness, and vice versa. Thisalternative explanation cannot be fully examined because pho-nological awareness was not assessed again with first-gradereading and because a measure of reading skill at the time thephonological awareness measures were obtained is not availableas a covariate. The children were, however, screened with theWoodcock Reading Mastery Test (1973) to eliminate blatantlyskilled readers (V. A. Mann, personal communication, Septem-ber 20, 1985).

Mann (1984) has reported a second longitudinal study thatextends these results. In January of their kindergarten year, 44children were given (a) a syllable awareness task that requiredreversing the order of syllables in 2- and 3-syllable words, (b) aphoneme awareness task that required reversing the order ofphonemes in a 2-phoneme nonsense syllable, (c) an IQ test (Pea-body Picture Vocabulary Test, 1981), and (d) several other mea-sures that are not of interest to us here. One year later, the samechildren, now first graders, were given the Word Recognition

and Word Attack subtests of the Woodcock Reading MasteryTest, and teachers rated them as being good, average, or poor in

reading ability.No relation was found between the kindergarten syllable re-

versal task and first-grade reading, which is surprising becauseof the relation between syllable segmentation and reading re-ported in Mann and Liberman's (1984) study. However, the cor-relation between kindergarten phoneme reversal and first-gradereading achievement was astonishingly high (r = .75, p < .001).The partial correlation we obtained holding IQ constant wasidentical, .75.

Mann's (1984) and Mann and Liberman's (1984) studies areboth consistent with a causal role for phonological awareness inthe subsequent acquisition of reading skills. However, whetherthis represents only half of the picture, that is, whether thecausal relation might be reciprocal, cannot be determined from

these studies.In one of two recent large-scale longitudinal correlational

studies, Bradley and Bryant (1985) examined relations betweenphonological awareness and reading in a 3-year longitudinalstudy. They also did a training study that we consider in thenext section. The subjects in the longitudinal study were 368nonreaders who ranged from 4 to 5 years old at the beginningof the study. (Bradley & Bryant excluded 20% of their originalsample of 503 children because they had acquired at least somereading skills, and 35 children dropped out over the course ofthe study.) Phonological awareness was measured with a soundcategorization task: Children listened to lists of three (for the4-year-old sample) or four (for the 5-year-old sample) words—all but one of which shared an initial, medial, or final sound—and then indicated which word was the odd one out. For exam-ple, children would hear "cot," "hut," "man," and "fit," andidentify "man" as the odd word.

At the beginning of the study, the children were given thesound categorization task, a memory span task requiring themto repeat the identical lists of words in order without identifyingthe odd one out, the English Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test,and miscellaneous other tests. Approximately 3 years later, thechildren were given (a) two standardized achievement tests ofreading, a spelling test, and, for discriminant validation, agroup-administered mathematics test; (b) the sound categoriza-tion test again; and (c) a short form of the Wechsler IntelligenceScale for Children (Wechsler, 1974).

The correlations between performance on the sound catego-rization task and performance on achievement tests 3 years laterwere .52 and .57 for the two reading tests, .48 for the spellingtest, and .33 for the math test. Holding constant the variablesof (a) age at initial testing, (b) performance on each IQ measure,and (c) memory for the word lists, sound categorizationuniquely accounted for between 4 and 10% of the variance inreading, 6-8% of the variance in spelling, and 1-4% of the vari-ance in math scores. With the exception of the lower value ofthe percentage of variance accounted for in math scores, thecontributions of the sound categorization score were significantat the .001 level.

These results suggest that the phonological awareness of pre-readers is at least one causal factor in their success in early read-ing and spelling. Of course, most of the variance in early readingand spelling in this study was due to factors other than phono-


logical awareness (e.g., IQ, educational history), but it is impor-

tant to note that phonological awareness was responsible for

between 4 and 10% of the variance in reading and spelling

achievement. With the large number of subjects, these results

are quite reliable. Further, several aspects of the procedures

used in the study suggest that the figure of 4-10% of variance

accounted for represents a conservative estimate of the true de-

gree of interrelation between sound categorization and reading.

First, Bradley and Bryant determined the proportion of vari-

ance in achievement scores accounted for by sound categoriza-

tion with a stepwise multiple regression of the achievement test

scores on age, two IQ measures, and memory performance. In-

cluding both IQ measures individually rather than one compos-

ite score representing both can rob some variance simply by

chance that rightfully belongs to the last entered phonological

awareness variable. Second, the regressions were done sepa-

rately for each of two standardized tests of reading, and sepa-

rately for 4- and 5-year-old samples. Combining the reading

measures should have yielded a more reliable criterion variable,

and combining the 4- and 5-year-old samples may have been

justified, because dropping 20% of the original sample based on

their reading skill probably restricted the range of both inde-

pendent and dependent variables. Finally, the 368 children for

whom data analysis was performed included 52 children who

had received some form of special training during the course of

the study. Because training was given to children with the worst

sound categorization skills and had a positive effect on final

reading performance, including both trained and untrained

children in the same analysis likely reduced the obtained pre-

dictive relation between sound categorization and reading skill.

Two aspects of Bradley and Bryant's (1985) procedures merit

additional discussion. First, their sound categorization task

might be a better measure of working memory' than of phono-

logical awareness. Recall that the task requires children to listen

to lists of three or four words and then indicate which is the odd

one out. As Bradley and Bryant correctly state, this is a test of

memory as well as of phonological awareness because the child

must remember the list of words in order to identify the odd

one. Memory load apparently was a consideration in designing

the task in that Bradley and Bryant (1985) decided to give lists

of three words to 4-year-olds because "four words seemed to tax

their memory too much , . ." and to give lists of four words to

5-year-olds because "three words seemed rather easy for the five

year olds, whereas four seemed, nicely, not too easy and not too

hard for them" (p. 39).

Including the memory span task in regressions of academic

achievement on the sound categorization task is a creative at-

tempt by Bradley and Bryant to tease out a measure of phono-

logical awareness from the composite measures of phonological

awareness and memory that the sound categorization task rep-

resents. Their logic was that variance in achievement test per-

formance attributable to memory span should be captured in

the regression analysis by the memory span measure, and that

whatever remaining variance is captured by the sound categori-

ration task should be due to that part of the measure that re-

flects phonological awareness rather than memory. Yet such a

strategy can be called into question because the simple span

measure may not be a valid measure of the memory require-

ments of the sound categorization task, a task that requires si-

multaneous maintenance of a list of words in a short-term store

while performing the cognitive operations required for picking

out the odd one. Tasks that assess storage and processing opera-

tions simultaneously can be thought of as more complete mea-

sures of working memory than are simple span tasks (Baddeley,

in press). Whereas working memory tasks, which have process-

ing demands similar to those of the sound categorization task,

assess the ability to store items while engaging in complex pro-

cessing, span tasks assess only isolated storage components of

the working memory system. Support for the idea that Bradley

and Bryant's span measure may not assess the "right" kind of

memory is provided by the fact that measures such as they used

are not strongly related to more complex working memory

tasks (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980).

Although we have argued that Bradley and Bryant's sound

categorization task may not be a good measure of phonological

awareness per se, it just might be the right measure to use pro-

vided that the memory demand of the sound categorization task

is similar to that experienced by an individual processing pho-

nological information while actually reading. In such a case,

the complex measure of sound categorization might be a more

useful tool for studying phonological awareness as it is used in

ecologically realistic situations than purer measures of either

phonological awareness or memory alone. Just what is being

measured by the sound categorization task is an important

question for future research.

The second aspect of Bradley and Bryant's procedures to

consider when interpreting their findings is that because they do

not report relations between early reading achievement and

later sound categorization, their conclusion that phonological

awareness has a causal role in reading may be only half of the

story: They did not address the possibility that learning to read

has a causal role in subsequent phonological awareness.

Another large-scale longitudinal correlational study of re-

lations between phonological awareness and later success at

reading and spelling has been reported by Lundberg, Olofsson,

and Wall (1980). This study is particularly interesting because

Lundberg et al. used a number of measures of phonological

awareness, including tasks to measure (a) segmenting and

blending of syllables and phonemes; (b) determining whether a

target phoneme is in the initial, medial, or final position in a

spoken word; (c) reversing phonemes; and (d) rhyme. In addi-

tion, there were two versions of the blending tasks, one that used

concrete materials, and another that did not. The concrete ma-

terials consisted of pegs used to represent either syllables or

phonemes, depending on the task. Words were constructed by

putting individual pegs into a pegboard. The subjects were 143

Swedish kindergarteners who differ from the kindergarteners in

most other studies because their average age was 7 years. Formal

instruction in Sweden begins 2 years later than in many other

countries. Thus, subjects were considerably older, yet no more

schooled, than the usual kindergarten student.

Near the end of their kindergarten year, the children were

given nine measures of the kinds of phonological processing just

mentioned, a screening measure of reading ability, and several

other measures not of direct interest. One year later, at the end

of first grade, the children were given an IQ test, as well as tests

of silent reading and spelling. Teacher ratings of achievement

also were obtained. Six months later, at the beginning of second


grade, the children were again given the IQ test and the silent

reading test, but a new spelling test was given because of prob-

lems with the original test.

The correlations between the kindergarten measures of pho-

nological awareness and first-grade reading achievement ranged

from a low of. 13 (p < .05) for segmenting words into syllables

with concrete materials, to a high of. 5 5 (p < .001) for phoneme

reversal, with a median correlation of .45 (p < .001). Phonologi-

cal measures requiring analysis of phonemes were more

strongly predictive of reading skill than were those that required

analysis of syllables (median correlations were .47 and .24, re-

spectively, with a test of the difference between these values

yielding p < .001). These simple correlations address the issue

of relations between individual measures of phonological

awareness and later reading; results from path analyses carried

out by Lundberg et al. address the issue of the simultaneous

relations between the phonological measures taken all at once

and later reading achievement. Among the measures of phono-

logical awareness, skill at reversing the order of phonemes (with

path coefficients of .56 and .47 for first- and second-grade read-

ing, respectively), and to a lesser degree, skill at producing

rhymes (with path coefficients of. 19 and .14, respectively) were

reliable determinants of reading achievement. None of the

other phonological awareness measures made a unique contri-

bution to the prediction of reading achievement.

Lundberg et al.'s data represent a uniquely important contri-

bution to our knowledge of empirical relations among mea-

sures of phonological awareness: To our knowledge, theirs is the

only study in which a large number of common measures of

phonological awareness were given to a large sample of individ-

uals. We took advantage of these data by reanalyzing them to

answer three questions. First, what is the nature of the interre-

lations among measures of phonological awareness? Second, are

the observed relations between kindergarten phonological

awareness and first-grade reading independent of general cogni-

tive ability? Third, are the observed relations between kinder-

garten phonological awareness and first-grade reading indepen-

dent of preexisting levels of reading skill?

Interrelations among phonological awareness tasks. The spe-

cific question we asked about the interrelations among mea-

sures of phonological awareness is whether different kinds of

phonological awareness tasks (e.g., segmenting vs. blending, syl-

lable vs. phoneme) tap different latent phonological abilities or

whether the different kinds of tasks tap a single latent phonolog-

ical ability. A principal-component solution for Lundberg et

al.'s data yielded two components with eigenvalues greater than

1. The proportions of total variance accounted for by these

principal components were .53 and .14. The proportion of com-

mon variance accounted for by the first principal component

was .80. After varimax rotation, the loadings of the phonologi-

cal measures on the first principal component were substantial

(from .61 to .91, Mdn = .86) for all variables except segmenting

words into syllables with concrete materials and rhyme. These

two measures were the only substantial loadings on the second

principal component, with values of .83 and .73. These results

suggest that much of the variance in common measures of pho-

nological awareness can be accounted for by a single latent abil-

ity. Confirmatory factor analyses carried out to determine (a)

whether segmenting and blending represented different latent

abilities, and (b) whether tasks involving syllables and tasks in-

volving phonemes represented different latent abilities were

also consistent with this view, in that neither distinction was

supported.

Stanovich, Cunningham, and Cramer (1984) provide further

support for this conclusion. They gave 10 phonological aware-

ness tasks to 49 kindergarteners whose average age was 6 years,

2 months. With the exception of three tasks for which ceiling

effects were obtained, the tasks were highly intercorrelated. The

mean correlation between the pairs of tasks was .62. A first prin-

cipal factor accounted for 47.8% of the total variance in the

variables. Correlations based on 31 of the children between the

kindergarten measures of phonological awareness and reading

1 year later ranged from .09 to .60, with a median of .41. Seven

of the 10 correlations were significant at the .05 level. Holding

IQ constant did not change the results much at all. The partial

correlations ranged from .08 to .58, with a median of .35. How-

ever, it was impossible to determine from the data presented

whether these relations were independent of preexisting differ-

ences in reading skill.

General cognitive ability. The partial correlations holding IQ

constant between Lundberg et al.'s phonological awareness

measures and first-grade reading scores were of special interest:

With such a large sample, these partial correlations provide un-

usually stable estimates of the degree to which each measure of

phonological awareness determines later achievement in read-

ing, independent of general cognitive ability. The partial corre-

lations we calculated from these data ranged from a low of .09

(p > .05) for segmenting words into syllables with concrete ma-

terials, to a high of. 5 3 (p < .001) for phoneme reversal, with a

median of .42 (p < .05). These results suggest that kindergarten

phonological awareness is quite strongly related to first-grade

reading, independent of general cognitive ability.

Effects of preexisting levels of reading skill. The partial corre-

lations just presented provide relatively strong support for a

causal role of phonological awareness in the acquisition of read-

ing skill. However, it is obvious that at least some of Lundberg

et al.'s sample had some reading proficiency before the study

began, because performance on the reading screening measure

given at the beginning of the study was related to first-grade

reading achievement. (If none of the children could read, there

would be no variance in this variable and thus it could not be

related to any other variable.) Thus the observed relations be-

tween kindergarten phonological awareness and first-grade

reading might originate from preexisting differences in reading

skill. To answer this question, we calculated partial correlation

coefficients between kindergarten phonological awareness mea-

sures and first-grade reading, with the score on the kindergarten

screening test of reading held constant. The results were strik-

ing. In contrast to the simple correlations reported earlier, the

median of which was .45 with all being significant, the partial

correlations with kindergarten reading held constant ranged

from -.07 (ns) to .21 (p< .01), with a median of .06 (ns). Only

two of the nine partial correlation coefficients were significant

at the .05 level. It appears that differences in original level of

reading proficiency could have been responsible for the ob-

served relations between kindergarten phonological awareness

and first-grade reading achievement, thus making ambiguous

the causal implications of these data.


We turn now to a consideration of experimental studies be-

fore summarizing all of the evidence relating phonological

awareness to the acquisition of reading skills.

Experimental Studies

Experimental studies, often in the form of training studies,

are a convergent approach to determining the causal status of

relations between phonological awareness and reading. If train-

ing in phonological awareness can be shown to improve success

in early reading, we can infer that phonological awareness plays

a causal role in the acquisition of reading skill. Conversely, if

training in some aspect of reading can be shown to improve

phonological awareness, we can infer that reading plays a causal

role in the development of phonological awareness. We now

consider studies that address the effects of manipulating phono-

logical awareness on subsequent reading, and of manipulating

reading instruction on phonological awareness.

Effects of phonological awareness training on reading skill.

One of the most extensive training studies reported to date was

carried out by Bradley and Bryant (1985) in conjunction with

their longitudinal correlational study of sound categorization.

The subjects in the training study were 65 children selected on

the basis of their poor performance on the sound categorization

task. The children ranged in age from 5 years, 5 months to 7

years, 4 months, with a mean age of 6 years, 1 month.

The children were assigned to one of four groups in such a

manner as to match the groups as closely as possible on the

variables of sound categorization ability, IQ, sex, and age. Chil-

dren assigned to a sound categorization group (n = 13) received

40 training sessions of unspecified duration once per week over

a 2-year period. The training consisted of a variety of activities

designed to teach categorization of words based on sound. The

children were trained individually, and because each child was

permitted to progress at his or her own rate, some progressed

further through a sequence of training activities than others.

Children assigned to a concrete sound categorization group

(n = 13) received the same training as the first group, and in

addition, used plastic letters for concrete demonstrations of

shared sounds among words. The children would, for example,

use the letters to spell a series of words that shared one or more

sounds by leaving in place the letter or letters that represented

a shared sound and replacing only those letters unique to each

word. Children assigned to a conceptual categorization control

group received an equivalent amount of training using the same

words presented to children in the experimental groups, but

they were trained to categorize the words based on conceptual

category (e.g., animals, colors) rather than sound. Finally, chil-

dren assigned to a no-treatment control group (« = 13) received

no training at all.

The outcome measures for which training effects were ex-

pected were standardized tests of reading and spelling achieve-

ment. Overall, the rank ordering of the four groups on the crite-

rion measures of achievement was (a) best performance for the

sound categorization group that got the letter training, (b) next

best performance for the sound categorization group that did

not get the letter training, (c) third best performance for the

conceptual categorization control group, and (d) poorest per-

formance for the no-treatment control group.

Of particular interest are comparisons of the sound categori-

zation and concrete sound categorization groups with the con-

ceptual categorization group, a group that is just the right con-

trol group for this training program. As predicted, the groups

differed reliably on the reading and spelling tests but not on the

math tests. However, nominal advantages of the sound categori-

zation group over the conceptual categorization control group

of 4 months for both reading and spelling and 3 months for

mathematics were not reliable (p > .05). In contrast, the con-

crete sound categorization group—the group that used letters

for concrete demonstrations—exceeded the conceptual catego-

rization control group by about 9 months in reading (p < .05),

about 17 months in spelling (p < .01), but by only 3 months in

mathematics (ns).

In sum, these results suggest that long-term sound categoriza-

tion training, in and of itself, does not result in greater achieve-

ment in reading or spelling. When supplemented with training

in the sound-symbol correspondences provided by the spelling

practice with plastic letters, marked gains are obtained. The un-

answered question is whether a group that only received spelling

practice with plastic letters and no sound categorization train-

ing per se would have shown gains similar to that of the concrete

sound categorization training group.

Fox and Routh (1976) examined the effects of training chil-

dren to blend phonemes on a paired-associate reading analogue

task that required decoding "words" made up of letterlike sym-

bols. The subjects were forty 4-year-olds, half of whom were

randomly assigned to receive sound blending training. After

training, the children learned to associate spoken sounds with

letterlike symbols in a paired-associate learning procedure. The

reading analogue criterion test was a paired-associate learning

task for two lists of "words" constructed from the letterlike

symbols. The items were repeatedly presented until either all

items were named correctly on two consecutive trials or a maxi-

mum of 20 trials had been given.

No main effect of the blending training was found. However,

when a median split was done by skill at segmenting words into

their constituent syllables and sounds, a reliable interaction was

found between sound blending training and segmenting skill.

Sound-blending training improved performance on the read-

ing-analogue task, but only for children who could segment

words into sounds {high segmenters). There was no effect of

blending training for children who were less able to segment

words into sounds (low segmenters). This result has been widely

cited in support of the view that both segmenting and blending

skills are prerequisites of successful acquisition of reading skill.

Although this view has intuitive appeal, a close examination of

Fox and Routh's work suggests that it may be a mistake to con-

clude from their study that both segmenting and blending skills

are important to early reading. First, the interaction between

blending training and segmenting skill occurred for only one of

two item lists used in the reading-analogue task. Second, it is

likely that the interaction obtained is an artifact of floor effects.

Taking, for example, the number of trials to criterion, the

means were 9.3 and 17.2 for the trained and control groups for

the high segmenters. Thus for high segmenters, blending train-

ing reduced the number of trials required for perfect perfor-

mance on the reading-analogue task. The problem arises in the

performance of the low segmenters. The mean number of trials


to criterion for both the trained and control groups was 20.0,

with a standard deviation of 0, which represents the maximum

number of trials given before discontinuing the reading-ana-

logue task. Because the performance of both the trained and

control low-segmenter groups was at the floor for this variable,

and because there was an effect of training for the high segment-

ers, it is impossible for there not to be an interaction of blending

training and segmenting ability. For all we know, the floor effect

for the low segmenters may conceal a main effect of blending

training.

One final problem in interpreting these results deserves men-

tion because Fox and Routh remedied it in a follow-up study.

This problem is that segmenting ability was not manipulated

and may have been a proxy for some other difference between

the groups that is related to reading, such as IQ. Fox and Routh

(1984) solved this problem by directly manipulating segment-

ing skill in a study of relations between segmenting, blending,

and reading. The subjects in this experiment were 41 kindergar-

teners, 31 of whom could not segment syllables into phonemes,

and 10 of whom served as a contrasting group of segmenters.

The 31 nonsegmenters were randomly assigned to one of

three conditions, within the constraint of keeping the ratios of

boys to girls proportional across groups. Members of a segment-

ing training group were trained to segment initial sounds from

the remaining sounds of words. The training took place in ses-

sions lasting up to 15 min, 4 or 5 days per week, for 5 weeks.

Members of a segmenting and blending training group received

the same segmenting training as the segmenting training group,

as well as practice at blending the first sound with the remaining

sounds in monosyllabic triphonemic words, for example:

m. . .an, p. . .at, and r. . . un. Members of a control group

received no training. Measures to determine whether the train-

ing worked included Fox and Routh's (1975) phonemic segmen-

tation task and the Roswell-Chall Auditory Blending Test

(1963). The transfer task for which the effects of training were

examined was the paired-associate reading analogue task with

letterlike forms used in the 1976 study.

The results showed that the segmenting training group per-

formed no better than the control group on the reading ana-

logue task, although there was evidence of training on Fox and

Routh's segmenting test. Thus, improving segmenting skill does

not by itself appear to enhance learning words made up of let-

terlike forms." The segmenting and blending training group per-

formed better than the control group on the reading analogue

task, the Roswell-Chall blending test, and Fox and Routh's pho-

nemic segmenting task. In fact, their performance on the read-

ing analogue task was not reliably different from that of the con-

trast group of segmenters who scored highest on all measures.

Unfortunately, a blending training-only group was not included

in this study, thus one cannot be sure whether the improvement

for the segmenting and blending training group represented an

interaction of segmenting and blending or a simple main effect

of blending training.

In sum, Fox and Routh's (1975, 1976) studies demonstrate

that phonological awareness training results in improved per-

formance in a reading analogue task. Whether such improve-

ment is evidence of an interaction of segmenting and blending

skill or simply a main effect of blending skill is unknown be-

cause of the floor effects in the earlier study (Fox & Routh,

1976) and the lack of a blending training-only group in the pres-

ent study.

Treiman and Baron (1983) carried the investigation of pho-

nological awareness training a step further by asking whether

the effects of training are specific to the actual spelling-sound

correspondences taught, or are general because training makes

children aware of the basic fact that spelling-sound correspon-

dences exist. In the second, and more powerful, of two experi-

ments, they used a within-subject design to study the effects of

training on 20 nonreading kindergarteners. Each subject prac-

ticed segmenting and blending the initial and remaining sounds

of one set of triphonemic spoken syllables (e.g., hem, lig, hig,

hem). They also practiced another set of similar syllables by

merely repeating them. Next, the children learned to associate

the individual sound segments of the syllables from both sets

with letters. Finally, children learned to "read" entire syllables

in a paired-associates learning task. The syllables were of two

types. Related syllables were syllables presented in their entirety

in either the segmenting and blending or repetition training

conditions, whereas unrelated syllables were syllables made

from the same segments but that had not been practiced pre-

viously in their entirety.

Evidence for an effect of phonological awareness training on

the reading analogue task was present in a small but reliable

interaction between type of practice (segmenting and blending

vs. repetition) and item type (related vs. unrelated). For sylla-

bles that received segmenting and blending training, an average

of 9.2 errors were made on related items and 10.6 errors on

unrelated items. For syllables that received repetition practice,

an average of 9.6 errors were made on related items and 8.9 on

the unrelated items. This means that children were more likely

to combine written syllable segments into syllables on the read-

ing analogue task if they had previously been trained to segment

and blend the same spoken syllables. This is not a large effect,

but it should be remembered that the training took place over

only 4 days. Though the lack of a main effect of phonological

awareness training suggests that its effectiveness was specific to

the individual syllables trained, the interaction between type of

practice and item relatedness declined over the 4 days of the

experiment, which suggests that as skill in phonemic analysis

and synthesis increased, the effects of training began to appear

for syllables that received repetition practice as well.

Effects of reading instruction on phonological awareness.

Alegria, Pignot, and Morals (1982) compared segmentation

ability in two groups of 6-year-olds. Both groups had received

approximately 4 months of reading instruction; however, the

instruction given one group was based on a "phonics" method

and that given the other group was based on a "whole-word"

method. The segmentation tasks of interest were reversing the

order of syllables in disyllabic words or pronounceable non-

4 One unusual feature of the segmentation training, based on the ex-amples presented by the authors, is that the units to be segmented didnot consistently reflect either the constituent syllables or phonemes ofthe words. For example, subjects were taught to segment the monosyl-

labic, triphonemic word man into m ... an. Yet, the word floor wassegmented into fl . . . oor, sandy was segmented into san . . . dy, andnose was segmented into n . . . ose. This might explain the lack of atraining effect on the reading analogue task.


words and reversing the order of phonemes in monosyllabic po-

lyphonemic words or pronounceable nonwords.

Reliable effects were found for type of reading instruction—

the phonics group did better—and for type of reversal—revers-

ing syllables was easier than reversing sounds. These main

effects are not particulary informative because (a) the groups

were not randomly assigned to type of reading instruction but

rather were sampled from two schools that happened to differ

in method of reading instruction, and (b) others have shown

that segmenting words into syllables is easier than segmenting

words into phonemes (Liberman et al., 1974). What is informa-

tive is that there was a reliable interaction between type of read-

ing instruction and type of reversal. On the syllable reversal

task, the phonics and whole-word groups were correct on 67.5%

and 73.5% of the items, respectively, a difference of only 6%. In

contrast, on the phoneme reversal task, the phonics and whole-

word groups were correct on 58.3% and 15.4% of the items,

respectively, a difference five times larger than that found for the

syllable reversal task. What remains to be determined is

whether members of the phonics group were better at real read-

ing than members of the whole-word group, and if so, whether

the difference in reading skill resulted from the differences in

phonological awareness between the groups or from some other

source.

In a related experiment, Goldstein (1976) evaluated the

effects of learning to read on the phonological awareness and

sequential memory of 23 nonreading 4-year-olds. The 11 chil-

dren in the experimental group were taught to read using Book

1 of Fuller's (1974) "Ball-Stick-Bird" reading system. Training

was provided daily in 10-min sessions for 13 weeks. A feature

of this reading system is its emphasis on blending sounds to

make words. The 12 children in the control group were read to

from the same book but neither read themselves nor were

trained in sound blending procedures. Segmenting and blend-

ing skills were assessed before and after training, as was sequen-

tial memory for sets of pictorial items whose names were sim-

ilar in sound (e.g., cat, hat, can, bag) or not (e.g., horse, spoon,

fish, hand).

The training program had reliable effects for sequential

memory performance but not for either segmenting or blend-

ing. Actually, the pretest-posttest gain of the experimental

group on segmenting and blending was about 20% greater than

that of the control group, but with only 23 subjects, even this

large difference was not significant. It is interesting to note that

almost half of the variance in acquisition of reading skills by

members of the experimental group was accounted for by pre-

test measures of segmenting and blending skills independent of

general cognitive ability.

A study recently carried out in China provides support for

reading instruction as a determinant of phonological aware-

ness. Read, Ahang, Nie, and Ding (1984) compared the phono-

logical awareness of a group of readers who had been trained in

Chinese logographic characters with that of a group of readers

who had been trained in the alphabetic spelling system pinyin.

A logographic system is nonphonological because there is a sep-

arate symbol for each entire word represented in the logogra-

phy. On a phonological awareness task that required the addi-

tion and deletion of phonemes, the group of readers that had

been trained in the alphabetic system performed well, whereas

the group that had been trained in the logographic system

did not.

Summary

Phonological awareness appears to develop at about the age

children are taught to read, although there is evidence that even

younger children have rudimentary phonological awareness

(e.g., Fox & Routh, 1975). The development of phonological

awareness for syllables precedes that for phonemes, and phono-

logical awareness tasks involving syllables appear to be easier

than comparable tasks involving phonemes in general. Based

on factor analyses of the commonly used measures of phonolog-

ical awareness (e.g., segmenting syllables and phonemes, blend-

ing syllables and phonemes, counting syllables, reversing the or-

der of phonemes), it appears that they are measures of a single

construct or underlying ability, rather than of multiple and un-

related skills (Lundberg et al., 1980; Stanovich et al., 1984).

Performance on measures of phonological awareness is re-

lated to performance on measures of reading achievement. Fur-

ther, the results of the longitudinal correlational studies taken

together indicate that phonological awareness and reading are

related independent of general cognitive ability. This conclusion

is based on the partial and semipartial correlations we calcu-

lated from the reviewed studies between measures of phonologi-

cal awareness and later reading achievement with 1Q held con-

stant, summarized in Table 1. In general, phonological aware-

ness tasks involving phonemes are more highly related to

subsequent reading skill than are those involving syllables.

The results in Table 1 from Mann (1984), Mann and Liber-

man (1984), and Bradley and Bryant (1985) support a causal

role for phonological awareness in the acquisition of reading

skills. However, these studies do not address the possible causal

role for learning to read in the development of phonological

awareness. To do so would have required obtaining measures of

both phonological awareness and reading at several points in

time. The deficits in phonological awareness found for adult il-

literates and the effects on phonological awareness found for the

phonics method of reading instruction suggest a causal role for

learning to read in the subsequent development of phonological

awareness.

The results of the training studies reviewed were mixed.

Some evidence was obtained for effects of phonological aware-

ness training on the acquisition of reading skill but there were

also some glaring null results, as in the case of Bradley and Bry-

ant's (1985) sound categorization training. Although Bradley

and Bryant reported impressive gains for children who received

phonological awareness training in the form of concrete dem-

onstrations using plastic letters, these gains may simply reflect

the extensive practice these children received in letter-sound

correspondences through the spelling activities that were part

of the training. We consider potential reasons for the mixed re-

sults of training studies in some detail in the General Discus-

sion.

Phonological Receding in Lexical Access and the

Acquisition of Reading Skills

In recent years a substantial body of research has converged

on the conclusion that there are at least two common means of


Table 1

Correlations Between Phonological Awareness and Later

Reading Achievement With IQ Held Constant

Study, phonological awareness task Coefficient"

Bradley&Bryant(1985)Sound categorization with 4-year-old

sample:Neal readingSchonell reading

Sound categorization with 5-year-oldsample:

Neal readingSchonell reading

Lundberg, Olofsson, & Wall (1980)Blending:

PhonemesPhonemes/concrete materialsSyllablesSyllables/concrete materials

Segmenting phonemes/concrete materialsIdentification of phoneme positionPhoneme reversalRhyme production

Mann (1984)Phoneme reversalSyllable reversal

Mann & Liberman (1984)Counting syllables

Stanovich, Cunningham, & Cramer (1984)Delete initial phonemeSegment initial phonemeReplace initial phonemeSound categorization:

Initial phoneme sameInitial phoneme differentSame as "initial phoneme different,"

but with negative instructionsFinal consonant sameFinal consonant different

Identify a rhymeSupply a rhyme

.25***

.31***

.21*"

.20***

.42***

.47***

.21***

.29"*

.44"*

.43"*

.53***

.20"

.75"*nf

.40"

.36*

.49"

.08

.32*

.58"

.46*'

.33*

.39*

.22

.05

•With the exception of data from Bradley and Bryant (1985), the re-ported values are partial coefficients. It was not possible to calculatepartial coefficients from their data, so these values are semipartial co-efficients holding constant two IQ test scores, age, and score on a mem-ory span task. Semipartial coefficients are lower bound estimates of thevalues of the partial correlations. b Neither simple nor partial correla-tion was reported, though Mann (1984) indicated that the simple corre-lation was not significant.*p<.05. **p<.01. "*p<.001.

lexical access (see Crowder, 1982; McCusker et al., 1981, for

reviews of this literature). The first means of lexical access,

which has variously been referred to as phonological receding

(Coltheartetal., 1977; McCusker etal., 1981), speech receding

(Crowder, 1982; Kleiman, 1975; Martin, 1978), and phonemic

receding (Baron & Strawson, 1976; Meyer et al., 1974), refers

to receding written symbols into some kind of sound-based rep-

resentation, and then using this sound-based representation to

access the lexicon. The second means of lexical access, which

has variously been referred to as direct access, unmediated ac-

cess, or visually mediated access, refers to pairing up written

symbols with their lexical referents without using a sound-

based representation system. Phonological receding is used to

a lesser or greater degree by all readers, depending on the famil-

iarity of a particular word, but it appears to be especially impor-

tant in the early stages of the acquisition of reading skills

(Baron, 1979; Doctor & Coltheart, 1980; Ehri & Wilce, 1979;

Stanovich, 1982a, 1982b). Facility of phonological receding in

lexical access as a determinant of early reading success has been

suggested by a number of phenomena and observations. We

briefly mention two of them.

First, the reading task on which good and poor readers differ

the most is naming speed for pseudowords (Hogaboam & Per-

fetti, 1978; Perferti & Hogaboam, 1975; see also Stanovich,

1982a, 1982b, 1985, for a review of this and related issues in

reading). Pseudowords (e.g., nke) share the phonology of our

written language, but they cannot have a lexical address to

which they might be directly paired because they are not real

words. They also cannot be processed as a familiar, or unified,

configuration of letters, because they have not been encoun-

tered previously as words. In decoding pseudowords, children

must access and integrate multiple phonological codes, so the

decoding speed for pseudowords is particularly sensitive to

difficulties in phonological coding of visual stimuli. The ex-

treme difficulties of poor readers in decoding pseudowords sug-

gest that at least some of their difficulties in word reading are

due to problems in generating the phonological code required

to access the lexicon.

A more direct observation that suggests the importance of

phonological recoding in lexical access is that dyslexic children

are slower at naming series of objects, colors, numbers, and let-

ters (Denckla & Rudel, 1976). Naming tasks such as these re-

quire lexical access, and there now is substantial support for the

view that the problem for dyslexics in naming tasks is due to

deficits in using phonological information for lexical access, as

opposed to deficits of a visual-perceptual nature (see Stanovich,

1982a; Vellutino, 1979, for reviews of this literature). For exam-

ple, the poorer performance of dyslexics compared to normal

readers disappears on visual processing tasks that do not in-

volve either phonological recoding or overt speech (Bouma &

Legein, 1980; LegeinA Bouma, 1981).

The literature on naming rate is complicated by the fact that

differences in rate between good and poor readers may depend

to some extent on the structure of the naming task. Stanovich

(1985), for example, has pointed out that studies using discrete

trial naming tasks report smaller differences between reading

groups than do those that require subjects to name items in a

continuous series. However, a recent report by Lorsbach and

Gray (1985) indicates that naming rate is reliably associated

with reading skill on discrete trial tasks if comparison groups

are substantially different from one another in reading ability.

Before turning to studies that address the causal status of re-

lations between phonological recoding in lexical access and the

acquisition of reading skills, we should note that it may be im-

possible to devise a task that measures recoding in lexical access

and little else, especially for young children. The ideal task

should measure the efficiency with which (a) the appropriate

phonological codes are retrieved from memory, and (b) the lexi-

con is searched for a string of phonological codes that matches

the search string of retrieved codes.

Consider several commonly used tasks to assess these aspects

of phonological processing. The rapid naming of letters would


seem to involve retrieving phonological codes, but not using

them to make lexical access. In addition to being incomplete,

another problem with this task is that it cannot be used with

young children who do not know the alphabet. Further, differ-

ential knowledge of letter-sound correspondences can inflate

correlations between the rapid naming of letters and later read-

ing skill even among groups of children who know the alphabet.

Switching from naming letters to naming objects should avoid

this limitation, although once again, phonological codes are not

used to make lexical access.

Naming real words seems to involve both retrieving phono-

logical codes and using them to make lexical access. However,

this task cannot be used with nonreaders, and, in common with

letter naming tasks, differential mastery of letter-sound corre-

spondences may account for much of the variance in perfor-

mance for young children. Another problem is that it is possible

to access the lexicon directly, especially for high-frequency

words, and thus not use phonological codes at all. Switching

to pseudowords avoids this limitation but introduces another

problem: Pseudowords cannot have a lexical address; thus it

seems that naming pseudowords cannot be a valid measure of

using phonological codes to make lexical access.


Wolf (1984) has reported results from a longitudinal study of

relations between a variety of naming measures and reading.

The subjects were 115 kindergarteners, 98 of whom were fol-

lowed through the end of second grade. The naming tasks,

which were administered at the end of the kindergarten year,

included (a) four continuous naming tests for colors, letters,

numbers, and objects (hand, chair, dog, star, ball); (b) a continu-

ous naming task for alternating digits and letters (e.g., 2 a 6 s 9

p); and (c) a continuous naming task for alternating digits, let-

ters, and colors. Measures of oral reading, word recognition la-

tency, and reading comprehension were administered at the end

of the kindergarten, first grade, and second grade school years.

The correlations between the kindergarten naming measures

and the first-grade measures of reading ranged from -.35 (p <

.001) for naming objects to -.71 (p < .001) for naming alter-

nate digits and letters. (The correlations are appropriately nega-

tive because the measure of naming proficiency was the amount

of time required to name a series of items.) In general, the mag-

nitude of the relations between the naming measures and later

reading varied as a function of (a) the stimuli to be named, with

letters and numbers being more related than objects; (b) grade

level; and (c) reading ability.

Perhaps the most important of Wolf's results is that naming

speed for objects reliably predicted later reading ability. This

result is of greater interest than the larger correlations found

between naming speed for letters and later reading ability be-

cause relations between letter naming speed and reading ability

may reflect other properties they have in common besides re-

quiring phonological receding (e.g., knowledge of letter-sound

correspondences).

The extent to which these results support a causal role for

phonological receding in lexical access in the acquisition of

reading skills is difficult to determine from the data presented.

First, the reported correlations, though large, may be inflated

by the relations of both the naming tasks and the reading mea-

sures with IQ. Second, it is not clear that naming rate differ-

ences necessarily resulted from differences in the efficiency of

phonological receding. For example, the naming rate differ-

ences might reflect the differential use of direct lexical access,

or, because the tasks were presented in a continuous naming

format, the ability to sustain speeded performance. Third, the

substantial correlations between the kindergarten reading test

scores and the naming measures indicate that a nontrivial pro-

portion of the kindergarten sample possessed some reading

skills when the naming tasks were first administered, and thus,

the observed differences in naming speed might have been

caused by differential prior practice at reading. Finally, the

naming tasks apparently were not administered again after the

kindergarten year, making it impossible to test alternative

causal models that might resolve the ambiguity about the direc-

tion of causality.

Lesgold and Resnick (1982) reported a 3-year longitudinal

study of causal relations between word naming speed and read-

ing comprehension that is at least indirectly related to the ques-

tion of causal relations between phonological receding and

reading. Their subjects were 127 first graders, 46 of whom re-

mained as third graders at the end of study. Word naming speed

was measured on four occasions over the course of the study,

and measures of reading comprehension were obtained on

three occasions. Whereas word naming speed was related to

subsequent comprehension (with one exception), comprehen-

sion was not related to subsequent word naming speed. Lesgold

and Resnick concluded that speed or automaticity of word

naming is causally related to the ability to extract meaning from

a text and is not simply the result of more efficient language

comprehension processes.

A strength of this study compared to other longitudinal stud-

ies of relations between phonological processing and reading is

that the phonological measure (e.g., word naming speed) was

given on multiple occasions over the course of the study, thus

permitting Lesgold and Resnick to test alternative models of

causal relations among the variables in their study. However, the

results of this study are only indirectly linked to the question of

causal relations between phonological receding for lexical ac-

cess and reading. Unlike naming speed for objects or colors,

word naming speed is obviously a composite measure that in-

cludes important reading processes other than phonological re-

coding.

Summary

The importance to reading of phonological receding in lexi-

cal access is supported by the magnitude of the differences be-

tween good and poor readers on naming speed for pseudowords

and the naming speed differences between dyslexics and normal

readers for objects, colors, numbers, and letters. Markedly fewer

studies have addressed the specific question of causal relations

between phonological receding in lexical access and the acquisi-

tion of reading skills than for phonological awareness. As a re-

sult, there is little evidence of causal relations.


Phonetic Receding to Maintain Information

in Working Memory

A number of models of working memory have been pro-

posed, each of which conceptualizes working memory as a stor-

age system of limited capacity that supports ongoing cognitive

processing (Torgesen, Kistner, & Morgan, in press). Baddeley

and his associates (Baddeley, 1981; Baddeley & Hitch, 1974;

Baddeley & Lieberman, 1980) have developed a model of work-

ing memory that has been applied to the problem of under-

standing beginning reading (Baddeley, 1979, 1982; Mann &

Liberman, 1984). We briefly describe this model of working

memory and the possible role of phonetic receding in the acqui-

sition of reading skills before beginning our review of work in

this area.

Working memory is conceptualized as a collection of interre-

lated subsystems, three of which have been identified at least

tentatively. The central executive is a limited capacity work-

space that can be used to operate control processes (e.g., execu-

tive routines and decision making) or to briefly store informa-

tion. The two other subsystems are "slave" systems to the cen-

tral executive in that information is sent to them for storage

at the discretion of the central executive. Which slave system

information is sent to for storage depends on the kind of infor-

mation to be stored. Visual or spatial information can be sent

to a visuospatial scratch pad for storage. Verbal information can

be sent to a phonological store for storage, a process that in the

context of reading is carried out by an articulatory loop.

The phonological store and the articulatory loop are of pri-

mary interest to us here. According to the working memory

model, verbal information is recoded phonetically and stored

in working memory in terms of its phonological features. The

means by which verbal information is registered in the phono-

logical store depends on whether the information is heard or

read. Verbal information that is heard is automatically regis-

tered in the phonological store. Verbal information that is read

also may be registered in the phonological store, through an

articulatory loop activated when the reader subvocally articu-

lates the information (Baddeley, 1982).

A number of studies have demonstrated the important role of

phonetic coding in working memory tasks. For example, Katz,

Shankweiler, and Liberman (1981) had good and poor second-

grade readers recall series of pictures that were either readily

labeled common objects or abstract line drawings for which ver-

bal labels were not apparent. Differences between good and

poor readers were found for recall of objects that could be la-

beled but not for recall of the abstract line drawings. Katz et al.

concluded that the problem for poor readers is not a general

problem in working memory but a problem specific to coding

items phonetically. Shankweiler, Liberman, Mark, Fowler, and

Fischer (1979) found that letter-span performance of skilled

readers was impaired when the names of the letters were phono-

logically confusable (e.g., b, c, d, p) compared to their span per-

formance for nonconfusable letters, but less impairment was

found for less skilled readers. This suggests that good readers

make more use of phonological information in span tasks than

do poor readers (see also, Bisanz, Das, & Mancini, in press;

Brady, Shankweiler, & Mann, 1983; Byrne & Shea, 1979;

Mann, Liberman, & Shankweiler, 1980; Perfetti & Lesgold,

1977, 1979; Perfetti &McCutchen, 1982;Swanson, 1978).

We next consider studies that address the issue of causal re-

lations between phonetic receding in working memory and the

acquisition of reading skill.


Mann and Liberman (1984) examined relations between

kindergarteners' memory span for word lists and first-grade

reading. Their subjects were 62 children who, in May of their

kindergarten year, were asked to repeat word strings that were

either phonemically confusable or nonconfusable. One year

later they were given the Word Recognition and Word Attack

subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test. If efficiency of

phonetic coding in working memory is related causally to the

acquisition of reading skills, one would expect reliable corre-

lations between the performance on the kindergarten measure

of memory for word lists and reading skill 1 year later.

The simple correlations between first-grade reading and kin-

dergarten word string span measures were .39 (p < .01) for non-

confusable word strings and .26 (p > .05) for confusable word

strings. Partial correlations with IQ held constant are identical

to the simple correlations because IQ was unrelated to the crite-

rion measure of reading.

In a follow-up study of 44 children, Mann (1984) replicated

these results. The correlation between kindergarten memory for

lists of nonconfusable word strings and first-grade reading ob-

tained in this study was .56 (p < .001). Holding IQ constant, a

partial correlation of .55 (p < .001) is obtained.

These results, then, are at least consistent with the view that

efficiency of phonetic coding in working memory is causally re-

lated to the acquisition of reading skills, although a stronger

case could be made had a measure of reading skill at the time

the phonological measures were obtained been available as a

covariate. We turn now to experimental studies that have inves-

tigated causal relations between phonetic receding in working

memory and the acquisition of reading skills.

Experimental Studies

Alegria et al., (1982), using two groups of 6-year-olds, com-

pared memory span performance for drawings of objects with

either phonologically confusable or nonconfusable names. One

group had received 4 months of reading instruction using a

phonics method, the other received 4 months of reading in-

struction using a whole-word method. Although the groups

differed in their ability to segment sounds, there were no group

differences in memory span performance. This result is not

consistent with the view that instruction in reading emphasiz-

ing the phonological features of words leads to greater efficiency

of phonetic receding in working memory. We do not want to

make too much of this null result, however, because it is based

on groups of only moderate size (32 children in each of two

groups) that were preexisting rather than created by random

assignment to method of reading instruction.

In addition to examining the effects of reading instruction on

working memory performance, we can also examine the effects

of training designed to improve memory span performance on


subsequent reading skill. The problem here, of course, is that

performance on span tasks is affected by several different kinds

of processing operations (Dempster, 1981). Large improve-

ments in span performance can be obtained by teaching special

mnemonic strategies like cumulative rehearsal (see, e.g., Butter-

field, Wamgold, & Belmont, 1973) or temporal chunking (see,

e.g., Torgesen & Houck, 1980). Furthermore, there is substan-

tial evidence that children with reading problems perform

poorly on many memory tasks because they do not use appro-

priate strategies efficiently (Bauer, 1977, 1979; Shepherd, Gel-

heizer, & Solar, 1985; Torgesen, 1977).

Even though memory span performance might be improved

by teaching mnemonic strategies, there is little reason to expect

such training to affect reading performance. It is doubtful that

elaborate strategies for improving simple storage of items on

span tasks can be used effectively while performing complex

tasks like reading (Torgesen, Kistner, & Morgan, in press).

Reading occurs at a rate that probably precludes the use of elab-

orate strategies to store individual letters, words, or phrases dur-

ing processing. Further, the use of elaborate mnemonic strate-

gies may tie up cognitive resources that could be more usefully

applied to other important processes in reading.

Summary

One important rationale for expecting efficiency of phonetic

coding in working memory to be related to the early acquisition

of reading skills is that efficient phonetic coding should enable

the reader to apply maximum resources to the difficult task of

blending together isolated phonemes to make words.

There is considerable evidence that good and poor readers

differ on memory span tasks and that these differences derive

primarily from differences in the efficiency of phonetic recod-

ing in working memory. Further, the relation between efficiency

of phonetic receding in working memory and reading skill is

independent of general intellectual ability.

Results of the longitudinal correlational studies that have ad-

dressed the issue suggest a causal role for efficiency of phonetic

coding in working memory in the acquisition of reading skills.

As was true for research on phonological awareness and phono-

logical receding in lexical access, insufficient attention has been

paid to a possible causal role for learning to read in the develop-

ment of phonetic coding in working memory.

Relations Among Phonological Awareness, PhonologicalReceding in Lexical Access, and Phonetic Receding

in Working Memory

We have reviewed three literatures that have developed in rel-

ative isolation. Each literature has its own set of tasks, and for

the most part, its own set of researchers. With few exceptions

(e.g., Blachman, 1984; Crowder, 1982; Liberman & Shank-

weiler, in press; Mann, 1985), the focus has been on relations

between one of the three kinds of phonological processing—

usually operationalized by a single task—and reading. The

question we address here is whether the tasks commonly used

to measure phonological awareness, phonological receding in

lexical access, and phonetic receding in working memory repre-

sent substantively distinct kinds of phonological processing or

skill. We briefly consider the theoretical and practical signifi-

cance of this question.

Theoretical Implications

The theoretical importance of the question concerns how

many latent phonological abilities or kinds of processing there

are. It is possible that the phonological tasks commonly used to

measure awareness, receding in lexical access, and receding in

working memory are basically measures of one general latent

ability. Alternatively, it is also possible that phonological aware-

ness and the actual use of phonological information—either in

lexical access or in working memory—represent separate latent

abilities. Finally, awareness, use in lexical access, and use in

working memory might represent separate latent abilities or

kinds of phonological processing.

The ambiguity about the nature of latent phonological abili-

ties carries over into interpreting performance on any given

phonological task. For example, two measures of phonological

awareness that reliably predict the acquisition of reading skills

are phoneme reversal and Bradley and Bryant's (1985) sound

categorization task. Compared to other commonly used phono-

logical awareness tasks, phoneme reversal and sound categori-

zation would seem to place the greatest demands on working

memory. Should we view these tasks as measures of phonologi-

cal awareness, working memory, or some combination of both?

Practical Implications

Reading skill has been shown to be related to measures of

phonological awareness, phonological receding in lexical ac-

cess, and phonetic receding in working memory. Determining

whether each kind of phonological processing is related to read-

ing independent of the other kinds of phonological processing

is a first step in constructing a phonological battery that could

be used to identify children who are at risk of reading failure

even before reading instruction has commenced. For example,

based on previous studies, it might be assumed that prereading

measures of phonological awareness, phonological receding in

lexical access, and phonetic receding in working memory each

correlate with first-grade reading at the .3 level. Depending on

their degree of interdependence, a battery that includes mea-

sures of each of the three kinds of phonological processing

could account for a modest 9% (completely overlapping mea-

sures) to an astonishing 81% (completely nonoverlapping mea-

sures) of the variance in first-grade reading.

In addition to the practically important issue of identifying

children at risk for reading failure, another implication of the

question about the number of latent phonological abilities con-

cerns training programs for enhancing the acquisition of read-

ing skills. If, for example, there should turn out to be basically

three distinct phonological abilities, each may represent a po-

tential locus of intervention. Alternatively, if there should turn

out to be basically one general phonological ability, then train-

ing programs should probably be directed at improving that

ability.

Empirical Studies

We know of only a handful of studies that address relations

among measures of phonological awareness, phonological re-


coding in lexical access, and phonetic receding in working

memory. With two exceptions (Blachman, 1984; Mann, 1984),

these studies have addressed relations between (a) phonological

awareness and phonetic receding in working memory, or (b)

phonological receding in lexical access and phonetic receding

in working memory,

Mann and Liberman (1984) gave a syllable counting task as

a measure of phonological awareness and a memory span test

for phonemically nonconfusable word strings as a measure of

phonetic receding in working memory to kindergarten preread-

ers. The partial correlation we calculated between these two

measures after holding IQ constant was .32 (p < .01). We car-

ried out a multiple regression of first-grade reading scores on

IQ, syllable counting, and memory for word strings, which

yielded an R2 of .25 (p < .01). With IQ held constant, reliable

proportions of variance in first-grade reading were accounted

for by syllable counting (ft = .32, p < .01) and word string mem-

ory (ff = .31, p < .01). In sum, performance on a measure of

phonological awareness was related reliably to performance on

a measure of phonetic recoding in working memory, yet both

measures contributed to predicting first-grade reading perfor-

mance. Similarly, Goldstein (1976) reported a partial correla-

tion holding IQ constant between a composite measure of pho-

nological awareness (segmenting and blending) and memory

span of. 47, p<. 05,

Mann (1984) gave a phoneme reversal task, a word string

memory task, and a letter naming speed task to kindergarten

prereaders. We calculated partial correlations with IQ held con-

stant of . 11 (as) between phoneme reversal and word string

memory, -.09 (ns) between phoneme reversal and letter nam-

ing speed, and -.11 (ns) between word string memory and letter

naming speed. These partial correlations indicate that perfor-

mance on these measures is not related at beyond-chance levels.

We carried out a multiple regression of first-grade reading

scores on phoneme reversal, word string memory, and letter

naming speed, which yielded an R* of .74 (p < .001). With IQ

held constant, reliable proportions of variance in first-grade

reading were accounted for by phoneme reversal ({S - ,61, p <

.001) and by word string memory (0 = .39, p< .001), with letter

naming speed approaching significance (0 = —.12, p < .1).

Blachman (1984) has reported similar results for measures of

phqnological awareness (segmentation and rhyming) and pho-

nological recoding in lexical access (naming speed for objects,

colors, and letters). She concluded that the measures were tap-

ping different aspects of linguistic processing, each of which was

predictive of reading skill.

Naming speed measures of phonological recoding in lexical

access have been found to be related to span measures of pho-

netic recoding in working memory by a number of investigators

(Mann, 1984; Spring, 1976; Spring & Capps, 1974; Spring &

Farmer, 1975; Spring & Perry, 1983;Torgesen&Houck, 1980).

For example, Spring and Perry (1983) reported a correlation of

.57 (p< .01) between digit naming speed and memory for pic-

tures with nonrhyming names for a mixed group of 30 reading

disabled and nondisabled children.

Summary

The issue of the interrelations among measures of phonologi-

cal awareness, phonological recoding in lexical access, and pho-

netic recoding in working memory is of theoretical and practi-

cal importance.

The theoretical importance of this issue is whether there is

empirical support for distinguishing phonological awareness,

phonological recoding in lexical access, and phonetic recoding

in working memory as separate phonological skills or kinds of

processing, or whether they are manifestations of a single skill

or kind of phonological processing. The studies we have re-

viewed suggest that phonological skill is to some degree general

across tasks that purport to measure awareness, recoding in lex-

ical access, and recoding in working memory. However, this gen-

erality is not complete, and empirical support for distinguishing

phonological awareness and phonological recoding in working

memory was found in their independent contributions to the

prediction of reading ability.

The practical importance of the issue of interrelations among

measures of phonological processing concerns (a) predicting

reading difficulties even before reading instruction begins, and

(b) identifying loci for possible training interventions. The com-

bined predictive power of measures of phonological awareness,

phonological receding in lexical access, and phonetic recoding

in working memory can be considerable. Mann (1984), for ex-

ample, accounted for almost three-fourths of total variance in

first-grade reading with three phonological tasks administered

in kindergarten. In addition, the fact that phonological aware-

ness and phonetic recoding in working memory each accounted

for unique variance in first-grade reading when both were used

as predictors suggests that each should be viewed as a potential

locus of remedial efforts.

General Discussion

We began this article by distinguishing three kinds of phono-

logical processing: phonological awareness, phonological recod-

ing in lexical access, and phonetic recoding in working memory.

We have addressed two major interdependent issues: the nature

of phonological processing and the nature of its causal relations

with the acquisition of reading skills. In this section we (a) sum-

marize for these two issues the major empirical findings from

our review, (b) identify important gaps in current knowledge

and issues to be resolved, and (c) propose the means by which

these gaps and unresolved issues can be addressed in future re-

search.

Nature of Phonological Processing

Our interest in the nature of phonological processing is fo-

cused on the question of whether phonological awareness, pho-

nological recoding in lexical access, and phonetic recoding in

working memory represent distinct kinds of phonological abili-

ties. Although we cannot answer this question with any degree

of certainty, we can provide a partial answer. Skill at phonologi-

cal processing is to some degree general across tasks that pur-

port to measure phonological awareness, phonological recoding

in lexical access, and phonetic coding in working memory. Fur-

ther, the generality of phonological processing skill goes beyond

that which may be accounted for by individual differences in

general cognitive ability. These conclusions are based on finding

significant interrelations among tasks that purport to measure


each of UK three kinds of phonological processing after holding

IQ constant However, the generality of skill at phonological

tasks is not complete, and there is an empirical basis for distin-

guishing phonological awareness from phonetic receding in

working memory: Tasks that measure each of these two kinds of

phonological processing uniquely account for variance in later

reading skill.

There are at least two means by which our understanding of

the nature of phonological processing might be advanced. The

first is to give a relatively large number of children tasks that

measure each of the three kinds of phonological processing, ide-

ally on several occasions over the course of their early develop-

ment of phonological skills. Alternative models of the nature of

phonological processing could be tested formally with confir-

matory factor analysis on the basis of their accounting for ob-

served covariances among the phonological processing mea-

sures. Plausible models of the nature of phonological processing

to consider include (a) a general ability model, which proposes

that performance on the three kinds of phonological processing

tasks derives from one latent phonological ability; (b) an aware-

ness versus use model, which proposes that performance on

phonological awareness tasks and on tasks measuring the use of

phonological information in lexical access or in working mem-

ory derive from separate latent phonological abilities; and (c) a

specific ability model, which proposes that performance on the

three kinds of phonological tasks derives from separate latent

phonological abilities. Developmental changes in the nature of

phonological processing could be examined by comparing re-

sults across multiple administrations of the measures.

A second means by which our understanding of the nature of

phonological processing could be increased is to look for re-

lations between particular kinds of phonological processing and

specific aspects of reading that should, in theory, be related to

them. For example, one might expect that phonological aware-

ness, especially in the form of segmenting and blending skill,

would be particularly salient to the acquisition of sound-based

reading skills at the word level. Measures of phonological aware-

ness would thus be better predictors of performance in reading

programs that emphasize a phonics approach than of perfor-

mance in reading programs that primarily use a whole-word or

basal reader approach. Furthermore, there is no reason to ex-

pect direct relations between individual differences in phono-

logical awareness and reading comprehension.5

Crowdert 1982) has proposed an account of the relations be-

tween phonological processing and reading that also has im-

plications for differential relations between various aspects of

phonological processing and reading. He suggests that when a

word is encountered, lexical access is obtained very rapidly by

activating an abstract phonological representation associated

with the visual representation of the word. In addition, as a re-

sult of subvocal articulatory processes, the word is phonetically

coded in short-term memory right after lexical access occurs.

Because lexical access can occur before words are actually

placed in working memory, quite a bit of comprehension can

occur without analyzing words stored in working memory.

However, storing word strings in working memory is important

for tasks such as resolving pronomial referents, following con-

voluted syntax, and making sense of difficult to comprehend

material, tasks that require examining relations among words

in complete phrases. Thus, although efficiency of phonetic re-

coding to maintain items in working memory may not be re-

lated to comprehension performance for easy material, for cer-

tain kinds of difficult text, efficient phonetic receding may be

crucial. For reasons we have outlined previously, the efficiency

of phonetic receding in working memory should also be related

to the accuracy of initial attempts at using word attack skills,

but might not be as predictive of the eventual speed of decoding

highly familiar words.

The existence of specific relations between certain aspects of

phonological processing and of reading could be determined

by administering measures of several aspects of phonological

processing (e.g., awareness, receding in lexical access, and re-

coding in working memory) and of reading (e.g., word analysis,

word recognition, and comprehension). If specific relations

were found, they would provide an empirical basis for distin-

guishing the different aspects of phonological processing skill.

Causal Relations Between Phonological Processing

Skills and the Acquisition of Reading Skills

We have reviewed two major sources of evidence about causal

relations between phonological processing skills and the acqui-

sition of reading skills: longitudinal correlational studies and

training studies.

On the basis of longitudinal correlational studies, we con-

dude that phonological awareness plays a causal role in the ac-

quisition of reading skills. There is considerable evidence for

such a relation from a number of longitudinal correlational

studies, but not enough to determine whether similar causal

roles exist for phonological receding in lexical access or pho-

netic receding in working memory. However, the description

just given of the causal relations between phonological process-

ing and the acquisition of reading skills is probably incomplete,

as it neglects a likely causal role for learning to read in the devel-

opment of phonological skills. The longitudinal correlational

studies we reviewed simply were not designed to determine

whether learning to read plays a causal role in the development

of phonological abilities. Further, the results of our reanalysis

of Lundberg et al.'s (1980) data are consistent with the view that

learning to read plays a nontrivial causal role in the develop-

ment of phonological abilities.

The training studies that have been carried out to address

the casual relations between the development of phonological

abilities and the acquisition of reading skills have yielded mixed

results. There are at least three important reasons for this out-

come. Before introducing these reasons, we must first reintro-

duce two rationales for expecting phonological skills to be use-

ful in learning to read.

The first rationale is provided by Mattingly (1980), who has

argued that a child with phonological awareness is likely to view

our system of writing as a sensible way of representing one's

language. Otherwise, the patterns of letter-sound correspon-

dences will seem strange and arbitrary. The second rationale

* Stanovich, Cunningham, and Feeman (1984) used path analysis to

show that phonological awareness affects comprehension only indi-rectly, through its influence on decoding speed.


starts with the idea that beginning readers have three basic tasks

to perform. They must (a) decode a string of visually presented

letters, (b) store the products (i.e., the sounds of the letters) in a

temporary store, and (c) blend the contents of the temporary

store to form words (Baddeley, 1979, 1982; Torgesen et al., in

press). Phonological skills, in the form of efficient use of phono-

logical codes to store letter sounds, enable the beginning reader

to apply the maximum amount of processing resources to the

difficult task of blending sounds to form words. Whereas these

rationale suggest that the effects of training in phonological abil-

ities should be largest very early in the acquisition of reading

skills, none of the large-scale phonological training programs

we reviewed began training until well after reading instruction

had begun.

A second possible reason for the mixed outcome of training

studies is that in many cases, there was no direct assessment of

whether the training affected the targeted phonological skill at

all; the effectiveness of training was evaluated only in terms of

its effects on subsequent reading skill. The problem is that a

phonological training program may or may not improve read-

ing skills, and for reasons that are unrelated to the theoretical

relations between the phonological skill and reading (Steinberg,

1983).

A third possible reason for the mixed effects of training stud-

ies is that phonological abilities may be difficult to train. Con-

sider how one might train phonological awareness. The typical

approach is to present exercises requiring children to work with

individual phonemes in isolation and then perhaps to blend

them together to form words. Yet in everyday speech, phonemes

are coarticulated, and the interpretation given of a target pho-

neme depends on the immediately preceding and succeeding

phonemes. Thus, there will be differences between what is expe-

rienced in everyday speech and what is experienced in phono-

logical training programs, and these differences may be non-

trivial.

There have been two approaches to addressing this problem,

each of which attempts to simplify the phonological task to be

trained. The first approach teaches segmentation and blending

of syllables rather than of phonemes, because syllables appear

to be more accessible to early readers than phonemes. Gleitman

and Rozin( 1973,1977; Rozin& Gleitman, 1977) took this ap-

proach in a training program for inner-city children. A rebus

approach was used in which syllables were represented by Dic-

tographs (e.g., an outline of a bee for the syllable "be") or by

letter sequences. Children were trained to combine picto-

graphic representations of syllables to make words. Preliminary

results suggested that children could learn to use the system

easily, and thus got practice at segmenting and blending they

might not have otherwise. However, it was not demonstrated

that benefits of training extended to phonemic segmentation or

to reading in the absence of the rebus. We are not aware of any

more recent studies of the effectiveness of this particular ap-

proach.

The second approach has been to provide concrete materials

to help train children to segment and blend phonemes. Bradley

and Bryant's (1985) use of plastic letters is one example, al-

though whether the concrete materials need be letters is at issue.

Elkonin (1971, 1973) has devised a program to train children

to segment words into phonemes. In the first stage of training,

subjects are shown pictures of objects. Below the pictures are a

series of unmarked connected squares, one representing each

sound of the word. Children are taught to say words by pro-

nouncing each sound in succession while placing the squares in

their proper positions. In the second stage, the concrete materi-

als are removed, and in the final stage, the child does not verbal-

ize the sounds. A series of training studies were carried out with

6-year-old nonreaders who were unable to segment words into

phonemes before training. After training, the children could

segment words into phonemes.

After over a decade of research, we know more about re-

lations between phonological processing and reading than we

do about relations between reading and just about anything

else. Yet perhaps the most important fruit of this labor is the

realization that it is no longer enough to ask whether phonologi-

cal skills play a causal role in the acquisition of reading skills,

or even whether learning to read plays a causal role in the devel-

opment of phonological skills. Rather, the question we must

now ask is both more complex and more to the point: Which

aspects of phonological processing (e.g., awareness, receding in

lexical access, receding in working memory) are causally re-

lated to which aspects of reading (e.g., word recognition, word

analysis, sentence comprehension) at which point in their code-

velopment, and what are the directions of these causal relations?

Not one of the studies reviewed is of the scope necessary to

answer this question. What is required are longitudinal correla-

tional studies that obtain multiple measures of each kind of

phonological processing and reading at a number of points in

time, as well as training studies that obtain similar kinds of

measures.

We describe one admittedly speculative proposal (Wagner,

1986a) in order to give an example of what an answer to the

question just posed might entail. The two-part proposal is based

on a quantitative synthesis of 16 longitudinal correlational and

training studies with a combined N > 1,200. It is largely an

integration of the views of Perfetti, Beck, and Hughes (1981)

and Baddeley (1979, 1982).

First, it is proposed that the ability to blend phonemes plays

a causal role in the acquisition of beginning reading skills. How-

ever, it is not the simple awareness that phonemes can be

blended to form words that matters, but rather the ability to use

phonological codes to efficiently store the sounds of letters and

letter combinations when blending sounds to form words.

Evidence from the quantitative analysis that blending rather

than segmenting plays an important causal role in the acquisi-

tion of reading skills comes from the fact that there are reliably

stronger causal relations for blending than for segmenting in the

acquisition of word analysis skills. Evidence that use rather than

simple awareness is what matters comes from the fact that

blending tasks are highly correlated with measures of use of

phonological information either in lexical access or in main-

taining information in working memory, yet segmenting tasks

are not. Finally, evidence that blending phonemes as opposed to

syllables is what matters comes from the reliably stronger causal

relations for tasks involving phonemes than for tasks involving

syllables in the acquisition of word analysis skills.

Second, it is proposed that the acquisition of reading skills—

especially those measured by word analysis tasks—plays a

causal role in the development of both awareness that words can


be segmented into phonemes and efficient phonetic receding to

maintain information in working memory. Regarding phonetic

receding, it is proposed that reading instruction and practice

facilitate the efficiency with which phonological codes are re-

trieved and paired with letters and the efficiency with which the

codes can be maintained in working memory once they have

been retrieved.

Evidence that reading plays a causal role in the development

of awareness that words can be segmented into sounds comes

from the fact that the acquisition of word analysis skills plays a

reliably stronger causal role in the development of segmenting

ability than blending ability. The quantitative analysis also pro-

vided evidence of a causal role for reading in the development

of efficient phonetic receding in working memory.

Whether this particular proposal about causal relations be-

tween phonological processing and reading or some other pro-

posal ultimately will be supported by further empirical work is

unimportant. What is important is that our future work should

begin to answer the question of how phonological processing

and reading are related causally, in a framework that allows

different answers for different kinds of phonological processing

and reading, at different points in their codevelopment.

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Received January 1,1986

Revision received April 7, 1986

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