A total of 38 preschool children (3 and 4 years old) were assessed on a set of phonologicalawareness tasks three times over the course of a year. The tasks used were rhyme and alliterationmatching tasks with distractor items that were either semantically or phonologically related to thetarget. In both tasks, the children found the distractors matched for phonological similarity moredifficult to reject than the semantically related distractors or the unrelated distractors. The resultsemphasize the importance of controlling for global phonological factors when designingphonological awareness tasks. The longitudinal findings are discussed within the context ofcurrent theories on the development of phonological representations.