Can individuals with Down syndrome acquire alphabetic literacy skills in the absence of phoneme awareness?

Two studies investigating the relationship between phoneme awareness and word reading ability in Down syndrome (DS) are reported. The first study included 33 Brazilian individuals with DS (mean age = 23 years). They all had begun to read and all showed clear signs of phonological recoding skills. Thirty-three normal children (mean age = 7 years), matched with the individuals with DS for reading ability, participated as controls. The second study included individuals with DS with a wider range of reading ability: a group of 46 readers (mean age = 22 years) and a group of 47 nonreaders (mean age = 18 years). The results question Cossu, Rossini, and Marshall's (1993a) claim that phoneme awareness is not related to alphabetic reading acquisition in DS. Although the individuals with DS who participated in the first study performed rather poorly on a task that presupposes the ability to explicitly manipulate phonological representations, they performed quite well on a task assessing the ability to detect phonemic similarities in words. We suggest that it was this ability that enabled them to acquire phonological recoding skills as well as they did, despite their cognitive limitations. The results of the second study were consistent with this interpretation. The ability to detect phonemic similarities in words significantly differentiated between the readers and the nonreaders, even after we controlled for variations in letter knowledge, intelligence, and chronological age.