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

This study investigated whether individual differences in vocabulary size, speech perception and production, and nonword repetition in 2½ to 3-year-old children predicted phonological awareness two years later. One hundred twenty-two children were tested twice. During the first testing period, we measured children's receptive vocabulary, speech perception, nonword repetition, and articulation. At the second testing period, we measured children's phonological awareness. The best predictors of phonological awareness at age 5 were receptive vocabulary and a measure of phonological processing derived from performance on the nonword repetition task. The results of this study suggest that nonword repetition accuracy can be used to index implicit phonological awareness at an age when children are too young to perform explicit phonological awareness tasks reliably.