A VALIDITY STUDY OF AN IMPLICIT PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS PARADIGM

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the validity of a non sense-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 o ther did not (e.g., /integral rib/). The subjects were required to cho ose the member of the pair that contained permissible consonant sequen ce(s). Eighty-one normally developing First-and second-graders were gi ven 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 phonolo gical awareness task and all of the experimental tasks, with the excep tion of one. Additionally, the implicit phonological awareness task wa s sensitive to developmental differences between the first-and second- grade readers.