Phonological awareness skills of 4-year-old British children: an assessment and developmental data

This study reports developmental data for the phonological awareness and processing skills of 57 normally developing Tyneside preschool children, aged between 46 and 58 months. The children were assessed on eight tasks: consistency of word production, phonological variability according to speech production task, non-word imitation, syllable segmentation, rhyme awareness, alliteration awareness, phoneme isolation and phoneme segmentation. The results indicated that girls and boys performed similarly; socio-economic status significantly affected performance on six of the tasks; and age was significantly correlated with performance on tasks targeting alliteration, non-word imitation, phonological variability, and phoneme isolation and segmentation. The older children were more phonologically aware than the younger children.