Children's phonological awareness: confusions between phonemes that differ only in voicing

Given the role of phonemic awareness in learning to read and spell, it is important to examine the linguistic factors that influence children's performance on phonemic awareness tasks. We found that, contrary to some previous claims, children did not perform better with fricative consonants (e.g., /z/) than with stops (e.g., /d/) in a phoneme recognition task. However, preschoolers and kindergartners were more likely to mistakenly judge that a syllable began with a target phoneme when the initial phoneme of the syllable differed from the target only in voicing (e.g., /t/ for the target /d/) than when it differed in place of articulation (e.g., /b/-/d/) or in both place and voicing (e.g., /p/-/d/). These results shed light on the organization of children's phonological systems. They also have implications for the design and interpretation of phonemic awareness tasks.