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Relationship between early phonological processing and later phonological awareness: Evidence from nonword repetition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2020

Michelle E. Erskine Open the ORCID record for Michelle E. Erskine [Opens in a new window] ,
Benjamin Munson  and
Jan R. Edwards
Michelle E. Erskine*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison and University of Maryland–College Park
Benjamin Munson
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
Jan R. Edwards
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Madison and University of Maryland–College Park
*
*Corresponding author. Email: merskine@terpmail.umd.edu
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Abstract

This study investigated whether individual differences in receptive vocabulary, speech perception and production, and nonword repetition at age 2 years, 4 months to 3 years, 4 months predicted phonological awareness 2 years later. One hundred twenty-one children were tested twice. During the first testing period (Time 1), children’s receptive vocabulary, speech perception and production, and nonword repetition were measured. Nonword repetition accuracy in the present study was distinct from other widely used measures of nonword repetition in that it focused on narrow transcription of diphone sequences in each nonword that differed systematically in phonotactic probability. At the second testing period (Time 2), children’s phonological awareness was measured. The best predictors of phonological awareness were a measure of speech production and a measure of phonological processing derived from performance on the nonword repetition task. The results of this study suggest that nonword repetition accuracy provides an implicit measure of phonological skills that are indicative of later phonological awareness at an age when children are too young to perform explicit phonological awareness tasks reliably.

Keywords

nonword repetitionphonological awarenessphonological processingpreschool-aged children

Information

Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , March 2020 , pp. 319 - 346
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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