Early orthographic influences on phonemic awareness tasks: evidence from a preschool training study

Experienced readers show influences of orthographic knowledge on tasks ostensibly tapping phonemic awareness. Here we draw on data from an experimental training study to demonstrate that even preschoolers show influences of their emerging orthographic abilities in such tasks. A total of 40 children were taught some letter-sound correspondences but not others. A selective effect of this training was found on their phonemic awareness task performance for the trained items. These findings point to the multidetermined nature of performance on tasks normally considered as measuring phonemic awareness and have implications for theories of the role of phonemic awareness in reading acquisition.