When reading is acquired but phonemic awareness is not: a study of literacy in Down's syndrome

The concept of phonological awareness (PA) has loomed large in recent discussions of the acquisition of literacy in alphabetic orthographies (Bryant & Goswami, 1987). The term is usually taken to imply overt knowledge of how spoken words can be analysed into their constituent sounds ("phones"). This awareness is assessed by such tasks as requiring the child to produce (or recognize) rhymes, to indicate how many sounds there are in a particular word, or to delete a constituent (phone or syllable) of a word and pronounce the remainder. It has been asserted that these skills play a causal role in the development of reading ability (Bradley & Bryant, 1983). We provide evidence against the position that such skills are essential prerequisites for reading (and any other hypothesis that claims necessary causal links between reading and PA). It is shown that some children with Down's syndrome can learn to read despite their failure on a set of tasks conventionally employed to assess PA. The pedagogic implication is that reading should be taught by teaching reading skills (including letter-sound correspondences), not phonological awareness skills.