Reports on a study designed to resolve debates regarding whether phonemic awareness is acquired naturally as part of phonological awareness, or whether it is an artifact of reading tuition. Describes a study of preliterate children, presents results of multiyear observations of students' literacy, and discusses implications for the developmental…

It has been suggested that children need exposure to alphabetic tuition before they can develop phonological awareness, especially phonemic awareness. This paper re-examines an existing data set to see whether two groups of pre-school, pre-literate children who differ in their knowledge of letter names (used here as a measure of alphabetic…

Investigates what skills are best able to account for orthographic analogy use during early reading and tests the finding that there is no independent association between reading ability and orthographic analogy use. Suggests that phonemic awareness and reading experience best account for analogy use, while orthographic analogy use contributes to…