Relations between Phonological Awareness and Vocabulary in Preschoolers

The primary focus of the study was to determine the relations among vocabulary and phonological awareness skills in two groups of preschool-aged children (n=118): those with typical vocabulary skills and those with deficits in expressive and receptive vocabulary. Additionally, we sought to determine if the patterns of relations among the variables differed by vocabulary status. Finally, given the different levels of linguistic complexity of the tasks (i.e., word level, syllable level, phoneme level, contextualized, decontextualized), we were interested in exploring whether the eight phonological awareness tasks were tapping a single underlying construct or distinct constructs. Results indicated that there were no group differences in performance on phonological awareness tasks. Vocabulary predicted unique variance in phonological awareness in both groups of participants. Finally, the eight phonological awareness tasks loaded on three components, not a single underlying construct.