Phonemic Awareness, Language and Literacy

The capacity to consciously represent phonemes in isolation appears in the course of learning to read and write in the alphabetic system. In this chapter, it is proposed that, besides this learning setting, some perceptual cues obtained during the activities of either speech comprehension, or speech production, or both, must be crucial for the acquisition of phonemic awareness. This view sheds a new light on the relations between phonemic awareness and phonological awareness. The whole set of conscious phonological representations may serve very different functions. Phonemic awareness depends on the capacity to focus attention on the perceptual representations of speech, rather than on a particular form of phonological awareness. At the end of this chapter, it is also suggested, on the basis of neuropsychological data, that phonemic awareness and knowledge of alphabetic correspondences either constitute the same mental capacity, or at least, rely on the same neural structures.