Do the sound and letter skills children have before primary school relate to how well they write sentences a year later? Researchers at Sakarya University in Türkiye set out to answer this. They followed 97 children aged 66–77 months from preschools in a socioeconomically diverse district in Turkey, over two academic years.
In the first year, the children were tested on two things. Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and play with the sounds in spoken words, such as clapping out syllables or spotting rhymes. Emergent literacy means early reading and writing skills picked up before formal schooling, such as matching letters to sounds. A year later, the children's writing was assessed with a validated sentence construction test.
Sound skills at preschool tracked sentence writing a year later
Both skill areas were linked to later writing. The link with phonological awareness was r = .46 and the link with emergent literacy was r = .32 (both statistically significant, p < .01). The "r" figure shows how closely two things move together: 1 would be a perfect match, and 0 would be no link at all. Both results sit well below 1. So children who were stronger on these skills tended to write better sentences, but the pattern was far from exact.
Syllables, rhymes and letter sounds stood out
Within those broad skills, three sub-skills showed the strongest links to writing:
- syllable segmentation (splitting a word into its beats)
- rhyming awareness
- letter-sound correspondence (knowing which sound each letter makes)
The skills did not differ significantly by age or gender in this group. The children were all within a narrow age range of 66–77 months, so the study says nothing about younger nursery-age children.
The catch: a link, not proof, and only Turkish children
The authors stress that the study was correlational. It shows that two things go together, not that strong sound skills cause better writing. They describe the findings as consistent with existing theories of literacy development, not as confirmation of cause.
There is a language caveat too. Turkish is a "transparent" writing system, meaning letters match sounds very consistently. The study did not cover English, bilingual children or Singapore, so we cannot say the same figures would hold for children here. It also had a modest sample and a single country.
The authors conclude that identifying children's skills early and supporting them in preschool settings may help later writing. The study did not test any home activities or teaching programmes.
Sound games that match the skills the study measured
The study did not test whether practising these skills improves writing. These ideas simply target the sub-skills it linked most strongly to later writing.
- Clap out the syllables in everyday words, such as names or foods, to practise syllable segmentation.
- Play rhyming games in the car or at mealtimes, because rhyming awareness was among the strongest links.
- Pair each letter with its sound when you meet it in books or signs, since letter-sound knowledge also stood out.