الفهرس 
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Abstract
Phonological awareness refers to the understanding of different ways that oral language can be divided into smaller components and manipulated. Skills that represent children’s phonological awareness lie on continuum of complexity. At the less complex end of the continuum are activities such as initial rhyming and rhyming songs as well as sentence segmentation into individual words. At the more complex end of the continuum is phonemic awareness or understanding that words are made up of individual phonemes and the ability to manipulate these phonemes either by segmenting, blending or changing individual phonemes within words to create new words.
Phonological awareness is an important determiner of success in learning to read and spell. For most children, strong readers have strong phonological awareness and poor readers have poor phonological awareness skills. Student’s level of phonological awareness at the end of kindergarten is one of the strongest predictors of future reading success in grade one and beyond. Some seem to develop these skills fairly easily within a stimulating classroom environment, while others need more instructions that consciously and deliberately focus on phonological awareness.
The relationship between phonological awareness and reading is reciprocal in nature. Early reading is dependent on having some understanding of the internal structure of words and explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is very effective in promoting early reading.
Early speech as well as early language difficulties are considered to be risk factors associated with future reading difficulties. Measures of receptive and expressive semantics, syntax and morphology as well as vocabulary size are considered longitudinal predictors of phonological awareness.
Language impairment is the main contributing factor leading to poor literacy outcome later in life because of the critical hierarchical links between language development and phonological awareness.
Early identification of children with poor phonological awareness skills will enable us to limit the development of these problems and put at risk children back on the path toward normal reading development.
In this study, phonological awareness skills were assessed in a group of delayed language children. This study was conducted on 50 cases with delayed language development of average IQ and 50 control subjects, 30 males and 20 females in the age range 5-8 years. They were divided into three groups, group A consisted of 24 cases, their ages range from 5years to 5years and 11 months, group B consisted of 16 cases, their ages range from 6 years to 6 years and 11 months and group C consisted of 10 cases, their ages range from 7 years to 7 years and 11 months. Each group was assessed by Standardized Arabic Language Test and Arabic Phonological Awareness Test. The results of the cases were compared to the results of control subjects.
The results of this study demonstrated that there was no significant difference between males and females in the performance of phonological awareness skills. By comparing the performance of phonological awareness skills for cases and control in the three age groups, there were significant difference in all skills except in segmenting words into syllables and blending syllables in group A. By studying the correlation between phonological awareness age and (total language age, receptive language age, expressive language age and semantics age), there were highly significant correlations. Significant correlation was found between phonological awareness age and articulation. Also there was significant correlation between phonological awareness score and the gap between language age and chronological age. This means that the more severe language disorder, the lower score on phonological awareness test.