This report gives details of investigations into the possible relationship between the development of children's abilities to categorically label speech tokens drawn from a Voice Onset Time continuum and their abilities in measures of Phonological Awareness. Data from children aged 7 years with prelingually diagnosed moderate-severe sensori-neural hearing loss is presented and compared with data from groups of children who have no hearing difficulties and are aged 5, 6 and 7 years. Whilst age-related trends in both speech perceptual abilities and levels of phonological awareness are found, amongst the children without hearing difficulties there is no evidence here of concurrent associations between abilites to categorically label speech sounds and abilities in the measures of phonological awareness. Performance in a measure of the identification and matching of word-initial phonemes is found to be facilitated by awareness of phonological structures at the level of rhyming syllables, but not phonetic (categorical labelling ability) information, in hearing but not hearing-impaired children; whereas in hearing-impaired children, but not those with unimpaired hearing, superior performance in the measure of speech perception is associated with better performance in the measure of word-initial phoneme matching. This latter finding is probably best accounted for in terms of the nature of hearing difficulties rather than a relationship with phonological structures.