A validity study of an implicit phonological awareness paradigm

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the validity of a nonsense-word-pairs paradigm as an implicit phonological awareness task. For this task one member of each nonsense-word-pair violated the rules of consonant combination in English (e.g., /integral kib/), and the other did not (e.g., /integral rib/). The subjects were required to choose the member of the pair that contained permissible consonant sequence(s). Eighty-one normally developing First-and second-graders were given the implicit phonological awareness task, 3 explicit phonological awareness tasks, 2 reading tasks, and a multisyllabic word production task. There were significant correlations between the implicit phonological awareness task and all of the experimental tasks, with the exception of one. Additionally, the implicit phonological awareness task was sensitive to developmental differences between the first-and second-grade readers.