Word Order Awareness and Early Reading

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Abstract
Previous research has suggested that metalinguistic awareness may be important in learning to read. In the present study, children's awareness of word order, as measured by the ability to discriminate between orally presented, normal, and scrambled word order sentences, was related to 2 measures of reading readiness for 105 first-grade children. The word order discrimination task required the children to assign the name "Norman" as the speaker of normal word order sentences and the name "Ralph" as the speaker of scrambled sentences. Children who made fewer errors on this task (N = 49) also performed better on both measures of reading readiness than did their peers (N = 56). Study 2 was a 1-year, longitudinal study measuring 3 cohorts (20 5-year-olds, 24 6-year-olds, and 30 7-year-olds) on the word order discrimination task and a test of general vocabulary (PPVT). After 1 year, about 62% of the original sample (N = 46) was contacted and tested on the Gates-MacGinitie test of reading achievement. Children who displayed word order awareness were reading an average of 1 year and 3 months ahead of the unaware children at all age levels, but did not differ from the unaware children in PPVT scores. Word order awareness may be important to early reading because it helps children to detect meaning relationships between words.

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