Using a longitudinal design, this study tested a developmental hypothesis about the growth of word knowledge in kindergarten readers. Based on previous work (Henderson, 1980; Morris, 1980, 1983), it was predicted that beginning consonant knowledge (BC) facilitates a child's concept of word in text (CW), which in turn facilitates phoneme segmentation (PS), which in turn facilitates word recognition (WR). Fifty-three kindergartners were tested at two-month intervals during the school year on BC, CW, PS, and WR tasks. The results of two different analyses provided convergent support for the developmental hypothesis (BC-* CW-> PS-> WR). Generalizability of the results is limited by the specific kindergarten instructional contexts in this study. Nonetheless, the findings do highlight some interesting relationships between beginning readers' emerging phonological awareness and their understanding of how spoken words map to printed words in text.

There exists a strong relationship between children's early phonological awareness (awareness of phonemes within spoken words) and their achievement in reading upon entering school. Over the last decade and a half this has been an important and frequently replicated finding in research on beginning reading (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Juel, Griffith, & Gough, 1986; Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, & Carter, 1974). The present study, a year-long investigation in kindergarten, contributes to the rapidly growing body of research on the relationship between phoneme awareness and learning to read. The data clearly highlight the unfolding of phoneme awareness as the kindergarten children start to become readers. In addition, the study traces longitudinally another concept not so frequently mentioned in theories of beginning reading, namely, children's concept of word in text-their awareness of the match between the spoken word and the written word in the reading of text. It will be argued that the establishment of a concept of word in text is a pivotal event in learning to read, pivotal in the sense that this orienting concept facilitates