The article presents a background on phonological awareness and its
relationship to language and learning disabilities, and postulates that
phonological discrimination skills are developmental in nature. Given
the strong positive relationship found in the literature, the study
investigated the phonological discrimination skills of two cohorts of
infants between 0;8 and 1;6, and discovered that 65% of both groups of
infants responded reliably to the task, while the remainder did not meet
the reliability of response criteria. The groups of infants were re-assessed
when the first group was 5 and the second group was 3 years of age, in
matched groups of those who passed and failed the phonological
discrimination task. The results, although preliminary in nature, indi
cated that there were significant differences in the performance of both
groups of children on a receptive language measure (PPVT), where
those children who failed scored lower than the passing children.
Preventive intervention implications from these findings are also
discussed.
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