Figure 1. The Developmental Continuum of Phonological Awareness.

Note: The development of phonological awareness proceeds along a continuum from awareness of large, concrete units of sound, such as words and syllables, to awareness of smaller abstract units of sound, such as phonemes. This is not a stage model in which a child has to master one level before moving to the next. Rather, as the overlap between levels in the figure indicates, children show beginning levels of skill on more complex levels while still working toward mastery of less complex levels. Children’s ability to combine words to form a compound word (e.g., hot + dog = hotdog) or to remove one word from a compound word and say what remains (e.g., baseball - ball = base) is one way to measure children’s word awareness. Children’s ability to detect words that rhyme with each other (e.g., indicating that hat rhymes with flat and cat but not ham or man) is one way to measure children’s onset-rime awareness.