Abstract
National (Dutch) and international research has shown phonemic awareness to be well developed at the start of formal reading instruction. Pupils score high on tests relating to phonemic synthesis (/p/-/oe/-/s/ yields /poes/) and phonemic analysis (/poes/ yields /p/-/oe/-/s/). However, these studies concern accuracy only, not speed. Our study shows the development of accuracy as well as speed of phonemic analysis in the second, sixth and tenth week. Accuracy is shown to be high already by the second week of formal instruction and virtually reaches a ceiling by the tenth week. Speed increases in the course of the measurements, with the greatest gain between the first measurement (in the second week) and the second (in the tenth week). However, despite high overall gains in test completion speed, considerable differences were found between individual pupils. Correlations between accuracy of phonemic analysis during the early stages of formal reading instruction and word recognition after four months were found to be low. Correlations between speed of phonemic analysis and word recognition after four months were somewhat higher but lower than expected. Apparently, success on these tasks is not a good predictor of reading performance.
