Geometry in Navigation : How children use the features of a space to guide them Spring 2015

Beginning readers decode words through individual pronunciation of the sounds represented by each letter in succession. This method requires not only the mapping of speech sounds onto their graphic representations, but also the more basic knowledge that words have the potential to be broken up into their component sounds, a skill called phonological awareness. Competency in phonological awareness is strongly associated with concurrent and later reading ability in young children, although the current literature posits that this knowledge only emerges at around 4 years of age. The accepted model of development postulates that phonological awareness is refined with increasing sensitivity to smaller intraword units. A different model theorizes that phonological awareness undergoes a process of explicitization, such that early implicit and receptive knowledge later becomes accessible to explicit verbal report. In this study, I aimed to determine whether 3.5-and 2.5-year-old children have receptive knowledge of phonological awareness that has been overlooked by the existing measures of this skill by implementing a novel measure with lower task demands. The results indicated that children at both 3.5 and 2.5 years old do possess receptive phonological awareness competency, and that variance in these abilities is predictive of improvement over a 6-month period. These findings challenge the accepted models of early phonological awareness development and urge further research into these abilities in very young children.