It has been suggested that children need exposure to alphabetic tuition before they can develop phonological awareness, especially phonemic awareness. This paper re-examines an existing data set to see whether two groups of pre-school, pre-literate children who differ in their knowledge of letter names (used here as a measure of alphabetic tuition) will also differ in their levels of phonological awareness. Their later performance on measures of school age reading and spelling attainment is also compared. The results show that the two groups of children did not differ significantly in either their phonological awareness or their literacy attainment.