2.3.8. Phonological Awareness

Four implicit measures of phonological awareness (initial syllable matching, final syllable matching, rhyme matching and initial phoneme matching) and their standardized procedures were adapted from Carroll et al. [64]. In each of the tasks, a child is shown a puppet, such as "Frode the frog"; for the initial syllable matching test, the child is told that the puppet likes to collect words that start with the same syllable. For each item, the frog puppet holds a picture card in front of the child, while two more picture cards are laid on the table. The child is asked to point to the picture beginning with the same syllable. The task was presented in the same way for the other three phonological awareness measures (with a different puppet for each), where children were told that the puppet would like to collect words with the same final syllable, words that rhymed/sounded the same, or words with the same initial sound. For every correct answer across these four measures, the child earns one point, and the summary scores for each of the measures are calculated separately. Both of the syllable measures consist of 8 items, while the remaining two measures consist of 16 items each. The four test results were standardized (z-values) and combined into a mean phonological awareness score.

For all the measures, standardized procedures were followed. Practice examples were provided before the tests started to ensure that the children understood each task.
