The authors examined whether exposing young students to spellings as they learn proper names would facilitate memory for the spoken names when tested without the spellings present (i.e., orthographic facilitation), whether emergent readers with letter knowledge would show this effect, and whether phonemic segmentation (PS) training would enhance…

Suggests that preinstructional evaluation in the areas of mental age, auditory memory, letter names, and the use of context-auditory clues would aid in making predictive, diagnostic judgments as to later reading achievement. (VJ)