This review examines the convergence of recent developments in the fields of language and literacy development and, in particular, developments relating phonological development to both language and reading development. It begins by examining the issue of how children represent spoken words. In particular, it presents recent work arguing that, throughout early and even middle childhood, children’s representations of spoken words are reorganised as sequences of phonemes. The second section examines poor readers’ phonologicol recoding difficulties and, in particular, the contribution of phonological awareness to early reading success. This section includes an overview of phonologicol awareness training studies in “at-risk” preschool and kindergarten children. The final section examines phonologicol processing difficulties as a common underlying cause of reading dificulties.This section provides a theoretical context for practitioners to understand diverse findings relating performance on a wide range of tasks to children’s reading achievement.

A longitudinal study was designed to investigate the possibility of improving current accuracy in prediction of reading disability, using phonological awareness (PA), oral language, and auditory temporal processing (ATP) as predictors. Preschoolers (n = 106) were tested on PA, and two groups were selected from the upper and lower quartiles of the PA distribution for initial testing as prereaders on ATP and oral language, and later testing on reading and oral language at the end of years 1, 2 , and 3. Oral language markedly improved levels of prediction previously achieved using PA alone. However, although ATP is related to PA and oral language in prereaders, it contributed little to prediction of reading achievement beyond that afforded by measures of PA and oral language. Options for improving the levels of prediction achieved here by increasing the sensitivity of our measure of AJP are discussed.

Despite clinical observation of the problems in emergent literacy experienced by unintelligible children, there are conflicting data about the possible relationship of expressive speech problems to literacy acquisition. Several confounding factors may explain the inconsistency in results across studies. Potential confounds include specificity and severity of speech impairment, age of participants, and pattern of speech errors. It was hypothesised that the presence of nondevelopmental speech errors can be considered a symptom of a breakdown at the level of processing phonological information that has an impact on both speech and literacy development. A cohort of 21 specifically speech-impaired children entering Year 1 at school was selected and classified into subgroups based on pattern of speech errors. Phonological awareness measures were administered early in Year 1 and literacy measures in Year 3. The results confirmed thot the presence of nondevelopmental speech errors predicted poorer phonological awareness skills and weaker literacy outcomes, particularly spelling.

The importance of phonemic awareness knowledge in learning to be literate his wellestablished. One dimension of its acquisition, the developmental trend from an implicit awareness of rimes to an explicit awareness of phonemes, has attracted substantial interest.A second dimension, a trend in the amount of phonemic knowledge that can be manipulated, or phonemic awareness span, is examined in the present study. One hundred and sixty children from Preparatory (Prep) to Grade 3 completed five phonological tasks: rhyming, onset-rime segmentation, initial sound recognition, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme substitution. Each task involved words ranging in length from three to five phonemes. Phoneme segmentation and substitution tasks involved words with six phonemes. Over this grade range, phonemic length influenced performance for each task. The nature of the influence varied with grade level; performance for the developmentally simpler tasks was affected at the lower grade levels, whereas the more complex tasks were affected at the higher grades. These trends supported gradual differentiation of phonological knowledge into a network of phonemic units. There are implications for dyslexia subtyping, for reading disabilities diagnosis, and for instructional design.

The relationship of maternal conversational input to theory of mind development was examined in a study of mother-child conversation involving children with autism, Asperger syndrome, specific language impairment (SLI), and normol development. Speech act analysis using Dore's (1986) categories was completed for conversation samples taken between mother and child during a toy selection task Comparisons of moternal assertions revealed lower proportions of reference to internal stote used with children with autism, Asperger syndrome, and SLI compared to those with normol children. Significant positive associations existed between the children's production of mental assertions and maternal descriptions, explanations, evaluations, attributions of another's internal state, organizational devices, clarifications, and requests for process. There were also significant positive associations between children's theory of mind development and moternal descriptions, explanations, clarifications, acknowledgments, rhetorical questions, and responses to process questions.These results indicate the importance of an elaborative style of maternal conversation to the development of theory of mind.

It is generally accepted that word comprehension emerges between 8 to 10 months of age and that speech production occurs several months later. In contrast, sign production appears earlier than its counterpart in speech and, by inference, suggests an earlier onset for comprehension. Most studies examining comprehension have tended to use older infants and have reported measures that may overestimate when words first are understood.This study examined the comprehension abilities of 33 infants between the ages of 5 and 11 months, using a parental diary-keeping method.The results support an early onset of comprehension within the context of common social routines and converge with a growing body of data on the cognitive precocity of infants.