Typical U.S. children use their knowledge of letters' names to help learn the letters' sounds. They perform better on letter sound tests with letters that have their sounds at the beginnings of their names, such as v, than with letters that have their sounds at the ends of their names, such as m, and letters that do not have their sounds in their names, such as h. We found this same pattern among children with speech sound disorders, children with language impairments as well as speech sound disorders, and children who later developed serious reading problems. Even children who scored at chance on rhyming and sound matching tasks performed better on the letter sound task with letters such as v than with letters such as m and h. Our results suggest that a wide range of children use the names of letters to help learn the sounds and that phonological awareness, as conventionally measured, is not required in order to do so.Knowledge about letters-their shapes, their names, and their linguistic functions-plays an important role in the development of reading and spelling ability. For example, children who are learning to read and write in English should know that the shape V is called /vi/ and that it generally represents the phoneme /v/ (see International Phonetic Association, 1999 for an explanation of the phonemic symbols). Children's knowledge about letters is often tested by providing them with one attribute of a letter and asking them to supply one or more other attributes. For example, children are shown the shape V and are asked to say its name in a letter name task or its sound in a letter sound task. Performance is typically pooled across all of the letters in each task to yield measures of children's letter name and letter sound knowledge. Some researchers additionally pool knowledge of names and sounds, for example by asking children to provide either the name or the sound of a letter and counting the number of letters for which either piece of information is known (e.g., Riley, 1996).Supporting the idea that letter knowledge is important in learning to read and spell, young children's knowledge as pooled across letters or across names and sounds predicts their later literacy skills (e.g., McBride-Chang, 1999;Riley, 1996). However, such pooling may mask Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. , 2006; Mc-Bride-Chang, 1999;Treiman et al., 1998). These differences suggest that children bring their knowledge of letter names to the learning of letter-sound correspondences, using the letters' names to help learn and remember the sounds they represent. Thu...