2.3.5. Phonology

To assess phonological awareness, we used four receptive measures adapted from Carroll et al. [63]: initial syllable matching, final syllable matching, rhyme matching, and initial phoneme matching. In each of the tasks, a puppet was used to make the assessment more child friendly. For example, when assessing the initial syllable, the child was told that the puppet likes to collect words that start with the same syllable. The puppet showed a picture card to the child and asked the child to point at the picture that began with the same syllable among two more picture cards on the table. The task was presented in the same way for the other three phonological awareness measures, with a different puppet for each measure. The maximum scores of both syllable measures are 8 each, while the maximum scores of the remaining two measures are 16 each. Cronbach's α for initial syllable = 0.57, final syllable = 0.77, rhyme = 0.85, and phoneme = 0.83.

In addition to phonological awareness, expressive phonology was measured using a Norwegian version of the Children's Test of Non-Word Repetition [64,65]. In this test, the child first heard a non-word of between two and five syllables in length and was asked to repeat the word. The maximum score was 28, and the internal consistency of the Children's Test of Non-Word Repetition across all 28 items was high (Cronbach's α = 0.83).
