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Three studies were conducted in which Quebec French, first grade children's ability to categorize vowels was examined. The children were tested on several aspects of vowel phoneme representation before they had any literacy skills, at the beginning of the school year, and again sis months later, after they had learned all of the spelling-sound correspondences for vowels. In Study 1, the focus was on children's phonemic and orthographic representation of nasal vowels. Performance on an AXB categorization task revealed that six-year-olds have considerable difficulty in discriminating the nasal feature on minimal and near-minimal oral-nasal vowel pairs. This ability did not improve after six months of schooling. In contrast to their performance on AXB, these same children performed very well on nasal vowel spellings. These results suggest that perceptually-based categorization ability and the ability to represent nasal vowels in spelling develop independently of each other. Study 2 examined children's categorization of self-generated productions of front-unrounded, nasal, and, back-nonhigh vowels. The influence of a number of variables on vocalic representation, such as articulatory complexity, spectral proximity, and syllable structure, was also examined. The children's performance on this explicit task varied as a function of the vowel set. Specifically, whereas articulatory complexity did not have a negative effect on categorization ability, spectral proximity of vowels did appear to hinder performance; syllable structure negatively affected oral but not nasal vowel categorization performance. Schooling, and exposure to literacy evidently had a strong impact on this type of phoneme categorization/representation ability as children's overall performance improved significantly from the first to the second testing period. In Study 3, children's ability to categorize vowel allophones which were spoken in two dialects was examined. Again, performance varied by the typ