Nonreaders' awareness of the basic relationship between spoken and written words

One hundred children, in four groups, were presented with 72 word pairs (spoken and written). Each pair consisted of one short and one long word. The subjects were requested to indicate a target word on a card and explain their choice. The basis for a correct nonreading solution was attention to the surface aspects of words and recognition of the relation between sound duration and number of graphemes. A main experimental variable was the relationship between number of graphemes and the size of the denoted object. In the youngest age group (4-year-olds) irrelevant and nonlinguistic solutions predominated. Older children were guided by semantic content. Proper understanding of the relationship between spoken and written words was observed among some of the oldest children (7-year-olds).