Gillam, R., & van Kleeck, A. (1996). Phonological awareness training and short-term working memory: Clinical implications. Topics in Language Disorders, 17, 72-81. Description of subjects   Sixteen preschool-age children with developmental speech and language disorders participated in this study for nine months. The subjects attended a private school that specializes in communication disorders. Three groups of children were involved in the study. The control group consisted of older children (mean age = 6;0) with speech and language disorders who did not receive any phonological awareness training. The experimental groups were the younger children (mean age for group 1 = 4;1 and the mean age for group 2 = 5;0) who participated in the phonological awareness training. Description of methodology   The phonological awareness training consisted of two semesters. The fall semester focused on rhyming activities. Students participated in rhyming activities two times a week for 15 minute sessions. "Children were led through a series of increasingly difficult rhyming activities with each set of rhyme pairs, progressing from recognition, to imitation, to identification, to judgment, and finally to rhyme creation" (p. 77). Each activity consisted of five rhyme pairs.   The phoneme awareness intervention was during the spring semester. The goal of this intervention was to help children develop an awareness of sounds in the initial and final positions of words. The sequence of phoneme awareness activities consisted of the following: "teach the initial sound-pictured word relationships, initial position phoneme judgment and correction, initial position sound matching, initial sound identification, generating words, repeat the same four-step sequence with final position sounds, sound blending-synthesis, and sound analysis" (p. 79). Summary of findings   The groups that received intervention made significant improvements in the areas of rhyming and phonemic awareness. "At the beginning of the study, children in all three groups performed poorly on the battery of phoneme awareness tasks. After training, the treatment groups (now aged, on average, 4;10 and 5;9) were significantly better that the six-year-old control subjects on these tasks" (p. 79). The researchers of this study also determined if phonemic awareness affected the children's literacy development. "The investigators found that phoneme awareness improvement, but not rhyming improvement, correlated significantly with the posttreatment measure of preliteracy development" (p. 80). In conclusion, the results of this research suggest that phonemic awareness instruction has implications for preliteracy development.