Ball, E., & Blachman, B. (1991). Does phoneme awareness training in kindergarten make a difference in early word recognition and developmental spelling? Reading Research Quarterly, 26, 49-66. Description of subjects   Eighty-nine kindergarten students participated in this study. The subjects were chosen from three elementary schools in Syracuse, New York. Students were eliminated from a sample of 115 students if they scored more than 1.5 standard deviation below the mean or if the kindergarten students were already reading. The remaining 89 students were randomly selected from the three elementary schools. The subjects mean age was 5.71 years old. Description of methodology   The 89 participants were randomly assigned to one of the three groups: phonemic awareness group, language activities group, and control group. The phonemic awareness group participated in phonemic awareness activities along with their regular instruction. The students were trained in these activities four times a week for twenty minute sessions. The activities consisted of say-it-and-move-it activities, segmentation activities, and letter-name and letter-sound activities. The language activities group met four times a week for twenty minute sessions. This intervention focused on vocabulary development, semantic categorization, and listening to stories. The control group received no intervention. Summary of findings  The phonemic awareness group made more significant gains compared to the language activities group and control group in phonological awareness tasks. "The children who received segmentation training improved significantly, not only in segmenting trained items, but also in segmenting items that were matched according to the features of production (matched-transfer) and items that were very different from those used in the training (broad transfer)" (p. 59). This study proved that kindergarten children can learn how to segment words into phonemes with explicit training. More students in the phonemic awareness group were able to read words on the Woodcock Word Identification posttest than the other two groups. "Students in the language activities group, whose letter-name and -sound knowledge was comparable to that of the phoneme awareness group, were significantly less proficient in word identification than children in the phoneme awareness group. These results indicate that letter-name and letter-sound training, when provided without phoneme awareness training, was not sufficient to improve the early reading skills measured by the two tests" (p. 63).