| The "of" is correct. What's confusing you is the sentence's inclusion of "and appeciation for". Remove that clause, and the sentence as written reads:
"Listening to good storybooks SHARPEN CHILDREN'S AWARENESS the sounds of spoken language."
That's now obviously incorrect. It should be:
"Listening to good storybooks SHARPEN CHILDREN'S AWARENESS of the sounds of spoken language."
The full sentence would then read:
"Listening to good storybooks SHARPEN CHILDREN'S AWARENESS of and appreciation for the sounds of spoken language."
Another way to think of it is parallelism. "Appreciation for" is correct, so "awareness" also needs something after it to connect to "the sounds". In this case, the missing word is "of". |