Non-word repetition and non-word discrimination in Swedish preschool children

By looking at data on expressive phonology, non-word repetition, non-word discrimination and phonological sensitivity in two groups of Swedish children, the common basis for tasks tapping into different levels of phonological processing is discussed. Two studies were performed, one including children with language impairment (LI) and one including children with normal language development (NL). A discrimination task consisting of non-word pairs differing in one phoneme was developed. In both groups there was a significant correlation between non-word repetition and phoneme identification. In children with LI phoneme identification was significantly correlated with expressive phonology. In children with NL non-word repetition correlated significantly with non-word discrimination, which was linked both to rhyme recognition and phoneme identification. Non-word discrimination might be equally useful as non-word repetition as an early screening tool and would circumvent the confounding factor of an expressive phonological impairment as well as decrease the amount of complicating factors involved in scoring procedures.