title: Age and schooling effects on early literacy and phoneme awareness.
abstract: Previous research on age and schooling effects is largely restricted to studies of children who begin formal schooling at 6years of age, and the measures of phoneme awareness used have typically lacked sensitivity for beginning readers. Our study addresses these issues by testing 4 to 6year-olds (first 2years of formal schooling in the United Kingdom) on a sensitive dynamic measure of phoneme awareness and tests of early literacy. There were significant effects of both age and schooling on the dynamic measure of phoneme awareness, word reading, spelling, and letter name knowledge, but there were no significant Age×Time interactions. This indicates that older children within this age group generally outperform their younger classmates (although they do not make faster progress) and that this advantage is developed prior to the start of school.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. a.j.cunningham@warwick.ac.uk
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cunningham
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Carroll
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001364:Awareness / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D013997:Time Factors; D006113:United Kingdom