Most children enter kindergarten with a substantial vocabulary and ade quate syntax. In addition, they have a sufficient command of most of the phonemes that constitute their language; that is, they can pronounce most sounds clearly (Singer, 1979). The aspect of language that these young children typically lack, however, is phonemic awareness, an understanding that speech is composed of a series of individual sounds. Cat, in other words, is simply cat, a furry animal that purrs. Young children are unaware that the spoken utterance cat is a word that is made up of a series of sounds, or phonemes, /k/, /a/, and Itl (see Adams, 1990, for a thorough discussion of phonemic awareness). Whether or not a child is phonemically aware can be determined through a variety of tasks (Lewkowicz, 1980; Yopp, 1988). One task requires that the child blend a series of orally presented sounds together to form a word. For instance, given the separate sounds /r/-/u/-/n/, the child should respond with the word run. Or, a child might be asked to tell what sound he or she hears at the beginning, middle, or end of a spoken word. What sound do you hear at the end of the word stop? What sound do you hear at the beginning of the word kite? Another more difficult task re
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