The first paper published in the Journal of Research in Reading on the topic of phonological awareness ( Schreuder & van Bon, 1989) appeared some fifteen years after the seminal paper by Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer and Carter (1974), which had demonstrated that there was a relationship between spoken word segmentation ability and reading acquisition. That the field had moved on in those fifteen years is evident in the sophistication of the questions addressed by Schreuder and van Bon. I present here a brief summary of Schreuder and van Bon's paper, and explore how some of the issues they discuss have been developed over the subsequent fifteen years.