Syllabic awareness and phonemic awareness: Which is the best reading predictor?

Abstract

Phonological awareness (PA) is an important factor during the reading learning process and is a strong predictor of future reading behave. In addition, it has been postulated that sensitivity towards some linguistic units such as syllable (syllabic awareness) would arise before beginning to read and other PA skills, such as phonemic awareness, would be a byproduct of learning to read. This research investigates the precursor role of PA in reading learning process and establishes which is the strongest phonological awareness ability to predict reading performance by assessing five year old non reading children with different phonological awareness tasks and a reading task one year later. The results obtained in this study indicate that syllable combination skills seem to be the more predictive ability when is correlated with reading performance on year later.

Keywords

• Phonological Awareness
• Reading Development
• Reading
• Pre-readers