Abstract
Phonological awareness is one of the critical skills in the acquisition of reading in an alphabetic orthography. The development of phonological awareness was compared across Turkish and English-speaking kindergarten and first-grade children (n = 138). The Turkish-speakers were more proficient in both handling of the syllables and deleting final phonemes of words. These patterns were related to the characteristics of the respective spoken languages (such as the saliency of the syllable, familiarity of the nonword patterns, importance of onset or final phoneme deletion, importance of vowel harmony) and the development of phonological awareness was discussed as a function of the characteristics of spoken language, orthography and literacy instruction.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bradley, L. & Bryant, P. (1983). Categorizing sounds and learning to read: A causal connection, Nature 301: 419–421.
Bradley, L. & Bryant, P. (1985). Children's reading problems. Oxford: Blackwell.
Calfee, R.C., Lindamood, P. & Lindamood, C. (1973). Acoustic-phonetic skill and reading kindergarten through twelfth grade, Journal of Educational Psychology 64: 293–298.
Caravolas, M. & Bruck, M. (1993). The effect of oral and written language input on children's phonological awareness: A cross-linguistic study, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 55: 1–30.
Cardoso-Martins, C. (1995). Sensitivity to rhymes, syllables, and phonemes in literacy acquisition in Portuguese, Reading Research Quarterly 30: 808–828.
Cossu, G., Shankweiler, D., Liberman, I.S., Katz, L. & Tola, G. (1988). Awareness of phonological segments and reading ability in Italian children, Applied Psycholinguistics 9: 1–16.
Durgunoglu, A.Y., Nagy, W.E. & Hancin-Bhatt, B.J. (1993). Cross-language transfer of phonological awareness, Journal of Educational Psychology 85: 453–465.
Eimas, P., Siqueland, E., Jusczyk, P. & Vigorito, J. (1971). Speech perception in infants, Science 171: 303–306.
Goswami, U. & Mead, F. (1992). Onset and rime awareness and analogies in reading, Reading Research Quarterly 27: 153–162.
Jimenez, J.E. & Haro, C.R. (1995). Effects of word linguistic properties on phonological awareness in Spanish children, Journal of Educational Psychology 87: 193–201.
Juel, C., Griffith, P.L. & Gough, P.B. (1986). Acquisition of literacy: A longitudinal study of children in first and second grade, Journal of Educational Psychology 78: 243–255.
Katz, L. & Frost, R. (1992). The reading process is different for different orthographies: The orthographic depth hypothesis. In: L. Katz & R. Frost (eds.), Orthography, phonology morphology and meaning 67–84). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Liberman, I.Y. & Liberman, A.M. (1990). Whole word vs. code emphasis: Underlying assumptions and their implication for reading instruction, Bulletin of the Orton Society 40: 51–76.
Liberman, I.Y., Liberman, A.M., Mattingly, I. & Shankweiler, D. (1980). Orthography and the beginning reader. In: R.L. Venezky & J.F. Kavanagh (eds.), Orthography, reading, and dyslexia 137–153). Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.
Liberman, I.Y., Shankweiler, D. & Liberman, A.M. (1989). The alphabetic principle and learning to read. In: D. Shankweiler & I.Y. Liberman (eds.), Phonology and reading disability: Solving the reading puzzle 1–34). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Liberman, I.Y., Shankweiler, D., Fischer, F. & Carter, B. (1974). Explicit phoneme and syllable segmentation in the young child, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 18: 201–212.
Lundberg, I., Olofsson, A, & Wall, S. (1980). Reading and spelling skills in the first school years predicted from phonemic awareness skills in kindergarten, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 21: 159–173.
Maclean, M., Bryant, P. & Bradley, L. (1987). Rhymes, nursery rhymes and reading in early childhood, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 23: 263–284.
McBride–Chang, C. (1995). What is phonological awareness?, Journal of Educational Psychology 8: 179–192.
Morais, J., Bertelson, P., Cary, L. & Alegria, J. (1979). Does awareness of speech as a sequence of phones arise spontaneously? Cognition 7: 323–331.
Öney, B. & Durgunoglu, A. (1997). Beginning to read in Turkish: A phonologically transparent orthography, Applied Psycholinguistics 18: 1–15.
Öney, B. & Goldman, S. (1984). Decoding and comprehension skills in Turkish and English: Effects of the regularity of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, Journal of Educational Psychology 76: 557–568.
Öney, B., Peter, M. & Katz, L. (1997). Phonological processing in printed word recognition: Effects of age and writing system, Scientific Studies of Reading 1: 65–83.
Printzmetal, W., Treiman, R. & Rho, S.H. (1986). How to see a reading unit, Journal of Memory and Language 25: 461–466.
Seidenberg, M.S. (1989). Reading complex words. In: G.N. Carlson & M.K. Tanenhaus (eds.), Linguistic structure in language processing53–105). Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Seidenberg, M.S. (1992). Beyond orthographic depth in reading: Equitable division of labor. In: L. Katz & R. Frost (eds.), Orthography, phonology, morphology and meaning 85–118). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Stage, S.A. & Wagner, R.K. (1992). Development of young children's phonological and orthographic knowledge as revealed by their spellings, Development Psychology 28: 287–296.
Stahl, S.A. & Murray, B.A. (1994). Defining phonological awareness and its relationship to early reading, Journal of Educational Psychology 85: 22–34.
Stanback, M.L. (1991). Syllable and rime patterns for teaching reading.Analysis of a frequency-based vocabulary of 17,602 words. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University.
Stanovich, K.E., Cunningham, A.E. & Cramer, B.B. (1984). Assessing phonological awareness in kindergarten children: Issues of task comparability, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 38: 175–190.
R. Treiman (1991) Phonological awareness and its roles in learning to read and spell, In D.J. Sawyer & B.J. Fox (eds.),Phonological awareness and reading the evolution of current perspective (pp. 159–189). New York: Springer Verlag.
Treiman, R. (1992). The role of intrasyllabic units in learning to read and spell. In: P.B.Gough, L.C. Ehri & R. Treiman (eds.), Reading acquisition 65–106, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Treiman, R., Berch, D. & Weatherston, S. (1993). Children's use of phoneme-grapheme correspondences in spelling: Roles of position and stress, Journal of Educational Psychology 5: 466–477.
Treiman, R. & Weatherston, S. (1992). Effects of linguistic structure on children's ability to isolate initial consonants, Journal of Educational Psychology 84: 174–181.
Treiman, R. & Zukowski, A. (1991). Levels of phonological awareness. In: S.A. Brady & D.P. Shankweiler (eds.), Phonological processes in literacy 67–84). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tunmer, W. & Nesdale, A. (1985). Phonemic segmentation skill and beginning reading, Journal of Educational Psychology 77: 417–427. Underhill, R. (1976). Turkish Grammar. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Venezky, R.L. (1973). Letter sound generalizations of first-, second-and third-grade Finnish children, Journal of Educational Psychology 64: 288–292.
Wagner, R.K. & Torgeson, J.K. (1987). The nature of phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of reading skills, Psychological Bulletin 101: 192–212.
Wimmer, H., Landerl, K., Linortner, R. & Hummer, P. (1991). The relationship of phonemic awareness to reading acquisition:More consequence than precondition, but still important, Cognition 40: 219–249.
Yopp, H.K. (1988). The validity and reliability of phonemic awareness tests, Reading Research Quarterly 23: 159–178.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Durgunoğlu, A.Y., Öney, B. A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition. Reading and Writing 11, 281–299 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008093232622
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008093232622