Adult non-readers have virtually no phonemic awareness ability and are unable to consistently perform, on their own, almost all phonemic awareness tasks.

Studies: **Adrian, Alegrai, & Morais, 1995; **Bertelson, Gelder, Tfouni & Morais, 1989; **Morais, Bertelson, Cary, & Alegria, 1986; Morais, Cary, Alegria, & Bertelson, 1979; **Read, Zhang, Nie, & Ding, 1986; **Scliar-Cabral, Morais, Nepomuceno, & Kolinsky, 1997

Research Summary: Experimental results from six studies (five experimental and one non-experimental) demonstrate that adult non-readers lack basic phonemic awareness, or the knowledge that words are made up of individual sounds (Adrian et al., 1995; Bertelson et al., 1989; Morais et al., 1986; Morais et al., 1979; Read et al., 1986, Scliar-Cabral et al., 1997). All of these studies evaluated non-readers ("illiterates") from countries other than the United States, presumably because it is difficult to find large groups of adults in the U.S. who have not been exposed to at least some literacy instruction. Each study used at least one group of non-readers that had been exposed to a language that, like English, uses an alphabetic writing system.

Although adult non-readers may possess some rudimentary, practical knowledge of phonemes, each study found that they are unable to consistently perform almost all phonemic awareness assessment tasks. Non-readers could not, for example, consistently delete a consonant from a word or nonword they heard in order to produce a new word or nonsense syllable (e.g., deleting the b sound in the word bat to produce the word at, or deleting the d sound in the nonword dak to produce the nonsense syllable ak). This was true even for adults who were literate in a non-alphabetic language (Chinese) but illiterate in the alphabetic version of this language (Read et al., 1986). This suggests that even those who are highly literate in a non-alphabetic language will not develop basic phonemic awareness unless they have systematic exposure to an alphabetic language.