Phonological Awareness and Nonword Repetition in Children With and Without Speech Sound Disorders: A Comparative Analysis.

Only 30 children per group, from a single clinic in Turkey, so the findings may not generalise to other languages or populations. Cross-sectional design: one snapshot in time, so no information about how these skills develop or respond to therapy. Phoneme awareness scores in the SSD group were near zero (median 0.0), a floor effect that makes it impossible to tell whether phoneme-level deficits are truly independent of memory or simply unmeasurable at this age. SSD subtypes (consistent vs. inconsistent errors, different error patterns) were not analysed separately, so the group average may mask important individual differences. Verbal working memory was measured only through nonword repetition, which also demands speech production; a child who cannot produce the sounds accurately will score low even if their memory is intact. Children with co-occurring language impairments were excluded, so the findings apply only to the subset of SSD children whose language is otherwise age-appropriate. The SSD group had slightly lower expressive language scores than the control group despite both meeting the inclusion threshold, and although this was controlled statistically, it may still influence interpretation.

No funding was received for the research. The open-access publication fee was covered under a TÜBİTAK–Wiley agreement. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not read the near-zero phoneme awareness scores in the SSD group as proof that these children cannot form phoneme-level representations at all. The task was at the developmental ceiling for this age range (48–72 months), and even the control group scored very low (0.93 ± 1.36). The floor effect also means the lack of a significant correlation between phoneme awareness and nonword repetition in the SSD group is a statistical artifact of restricted score range, not evidence that the two skills are independent.