Phonemic awareness development in 2.5- and 3.5-year- old children: an examination of emergent, receptive, knowledge and skills Brandi Biscoe Kenner 1,2,3 · Nicole Patton Terry 3,4 · Arielle H. Friehling 1,5 · Laura L. Namy 1 Published online: 5 April 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract The National Institutes of Health has deemed illiteracy a national health crisis based on reading proficiency rates among American children. In 2002, the National Early Literacy Panel identified six pre-reading skills that are most crucial precursors to reading mastery and predict future reading outcomes. Of those skills, phonological awareness, and in particular phonemic awareness, is the strongest independent predictor of early reading outcomes. However, limited research has addressed the development of these component skills due in part to the fact that many of the measures used to assess sub-skills such as phonemic awareness are oral production measures that cannot easily be administered with children under the age of five, and are not designed to detect implicit or emerging knowledge. To address this limitation, we developed and administered two receptive measures of phonemic awareness to 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children. We found evidence for the emergence of this component skill earlier in ontogeny than is currently acknowledged in the & Brandi Biscoe Kenner bbiscoe@emory.edu; bkenner@atlantaspeechschool.org Nicole Patton Terry npterry@gsu.edu Arielle H. Friehling afriehling@jd17.law.harvard.edu Laura L. Namy lnamy@emory.edu 1 Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA 2 Atlanta Speech School, 3160 Northside Parkway, NW, Atlanta, GA 30327, USA 3 Department of Educational Psychology, Special Education, and Communication Disorders, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA 4 Haskins Laboratories, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA 5 Law School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA 123 Read Writ (2017) 30:1575–1594 DOI 10.1007/s11145-017-9738-0