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

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.