To examine the effects of phonemic awareness (defined as "conscious access to the phonemic level of the speech stream and some ability to cognitively manipulate representations at this level") on spelling development and to explore the relationship of phonemic awareness to recognized stages of spelling development, a study collected data on 96 first-grade students and 87 third-grade students attending public school in southeast Texas. Children in both grades received traditional reading instruction from basal reading series reflecting a whole-word approach to initial reading instruction. All children in the study spelled the same set of 40 words. Phonemic awareness was measured using the GKR Test of Phonemic Awareness, an oral test consisting of six subtests--phonemic segmentation, blending, deletion of first phoneme, deletion of last phoneme, substitution of first phoneme, and substitution of last phoneme. Word specific information was measured using a test containing 60 two-alternative, forced-choice items. One alternative was a correct spelling for the word. The other was a phonetically legitimate though incorrect spelling. Children were instructed to circle the correct spelling for each word as it was pronounced by the researcher. Findings suggested that in first-graders, phonemic awareness had a more powerful effect, indicating that spelling at this level is more of a sequential, encoding process. By third grade, word-specific information exerted stronger influence on spelling, suggesting that children at this level spell using memorized associations. (MM)