Ten different phonological awareness tasks were administered to a group of kindergarten children whose reading ability was assessed 1 year later. The extraneous cognitive requirements inherent in the tasks varied widely. The children's performance on three tasks that involved a rhyming response was at ceiling, and these tasks did not correlate with subsequent reading progress. The other seven measures were all moderately related to later reading ability and, employed in sets, were very strong predictors. The relative predictive accuracy of the phonological tasks was equal to or better than more global measures of cognitive skills such as an intelligence test and a reading readiness test. The phonological tasks had a large amount of common variance. Factor analysis revealed only one factor on which all the nonrhyming phonological tasks loaded highly. The results bolster the construct validity of phonological awareness, indicate considerable comparability and interchangeability among the tasks used to measure the construct, and are encouraging as regards the possible use of such tasks in predictive test batteries. Researchers interested in the cognitive determinants of early reading acquisition have increasingly focused on phonological awareness as a The authors thank Cecilia Wiar, Principal, and the teachers and students of Clarkston Elementary School, Clarkston, MI, for their cooperation. Anita Davison and Maryanne Dedtick deserve special thanks for their enthusiatic participation. The authors thank Dorothy Feeman and Ruth Nathan for their comments of the manuscript. Requests for reprints should be sent to