THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHONOLOGICAL SKILLS IN PRESCHOOL CHILDREN

The paper presents a portion of the results obtained in the first phase of a longitudinal study of the development of children's literacy. The aim of the research was to study the level of development of phonological skills in preschool children. The development of phonological skills, as part of metalinguistic skills, was studied by the assessment of voice analysis and synthesis in words and recognising rhyme. The sample included preschool children. The obtained results have pointed to an average development of children's phonological skills in the domain of the ability of voice synthesis and analysis in words, as well as to the difficulties in solving items that contained more complex demands of manipulating phonemes within words. It was also determined that there were difficulties in recognising rhyme in words where phonological similarity was more prominent on the level of the whole word. Since there are very few research studies in our country that deal with the development of phonological skills in preschool children, which are an important predictor for the acquisition of reading and writing skills, the findings of this research can provide an insight into the development of this aspect of children's speech and language, while in the long run they would enable us to observe the influence of this predictor on the success in initial reading and writing.