The present study aimed to shed light on (i) the most accessible phonological unit and (ii) the nature of letter knowledge among native Arabic-speaking preschool children living in Israel. One hundred and sixty-seven children were assessed on phonological awareness with initial and final isolation tasks as well as knowledge of the standard names and sounds of Arabic letters. Children’s responses in these tasks were categorized in accordance with the phonological unit that the child supplied. Regarding phonological unit accessibility, the novel finding of this study was the prevalence of a tri-phonemic /ʔεC/ unit that begins with the prefix /ʔε-/ and ends with the target (consonantal) phoneme which we have termed the “demi-phoneme” (e.g., /ʔεs/ for the consonant /s/). Awareness of the consonant–vowel unit was the next most prevalent unit followed lastly by the “smallest unit” – the phoneme. It appears that the demi-phoneme functions as a psycholinguistic aid to facilitate phoneme perception and pronunciation (as proposed by the 8th-century scholar – Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi) and both phoneme and demi-phoneme responses are underpinned by the same knowledge. With regard to letter knowledge, the standard name for Arabic letters was the preferred response and letter sounds were retrieved as a demi-phoneme unit.

We have observed SBS 1150+599A spectroscopically in the UV using HST to derive C/H $\sim$ 7.6 and N/H $\sim$ 7.0 for the first time. The central star temperature is now better constrained to $\sim$130,000K, but still is not well determined. This uncertainty dominates the error in O/H, which has been the subject of debate, yet with these data, SBS 1150+599A has the lowest O/H of any PN. Furthermore, the physics of this object are so extreme that minor differences in atomic modeling impact the composition analysis strongly. We also find that the binary central star, based on photometric and kinematic variations, exhibits CV-like properties with an amplitude of 13% and an orbital period of 3.924 hours.