Phonological and semantic processes influence beginning readers' ability to learn to read words.

Children (4 to 6 years of age) were taught to associate printed 3- or 4-letter abbreviations, or cues, with spoken words (e.g., bfr for beaver). All but 1 of the letters in the cue corresponded to phonemes in the spoken target word. Two types of cues were constructed: phonetic cues, in which the medial letter was phonetically similar to the target word, and control cues, in which the central phoneme was phonetically dissimilar. In Experiment 1, children learned the phonetic cues better than the control cues, and learning correlated with measures of phonological skill and knowledge of the meanings of the words taught. In Experiment 2, the target words differed on a semantic variable-imageability-and learning was influenced by both the phonetic properties of the cue and the imageability of the words used.