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Listening to good storybooks sharpens children’s awareness of and appreciation for the sounds of spoken language.

I know it sounds similar to the 'awareness of vs for' debate but can we omit the 'of' here entirely ie "... awareness and appreciation for.."

Does every specific component needs its own preposition or can it be shared?

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    It can generally only be shared if it would naturally use the same preposition.
    – Catija
    Commented May 3, 2015 at 5:16

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Both awareness of and appreciation for are in construction with the rest of the noun phrase at the same time:

　diagram 1

If you remove of, you get this:

　diagram 2

That doesn't really work because *awareness for doesn't work. Both the top and the bottom have to be grammatical by themselves. But otherwise, yeah, it'd be perfectly fine having them share a preposition.

By the way, some speakers might not notice anything wrong with the version without of, but I think it's really a matter of whether they're paying close attention. Sometimes, when you coordinate two things like this, people don't really notice they don't fit together unless they really focus. But other people will notice, and I wouldn't really say it's grammatical.

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