The role of phonological awareness in mediating between reading and listening to speech

Previous studies have shown that phonological awareness correlates with children's reading aloud and also adults' literacy experience. More recent research has further suggested that phonological awareness is associated with the processing of spoken language, which is a correlate of reading comprehension. In this paper, I argue that phonological awareness, reading, and spoken language are intercorrelated because phonological awareness mediates between the processing of written and spoken language, so far as the derivation of phonological information from print and speech is concerned. For meaning activation, phonological awareness may not have a role to play in linking reading to spoken language. In native and non-native adult speakers of English, I demonstrated: (1) a correlation between processing speech for meaning (i.e., listening comprehension) and reading comprehension, but not reading aloud; (2) a correlation between processing speech for phonological information (i.e., auditory phonological priming and phoneme discrimination) and reading aloud, but not reading comprehension; and (3) that phonological awareness mediated (2) but not (1). The implication is that phonological awareness binds reading and listening to speech only at the level of deriving a phonological code. Copyright © 2006 Psychology Press, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business.