When a child dissolves into laughter at the word ‘snizzlepop,’ or carefully sounds out ‘gorp’ as though it might be real, something serious is happening underneath the silliness. Nonsense words — letter strings that follow the rules of a language without belonging to its vocabulary — turn out to be one of the more elegant tools available for developing and assessing early reading.
Researchers have found that nonsense word fluency is a reliable predictor of later reading ability — precisely because children cannot draw on memory or context to read them. They have to decode (1, 2). Brain imaging research suggests that the same language networks involved in processing real words are active when children encounter nonsense words, making them a genuine training ground for the reading brain.
This article explores what nonsense words do, why they work, and what makes them most useful — including when they can go wrong.
The giggle at 'snizzlepop' is not a distraction from learning
Most parents and teachers have seen it: a child encounters a made-up word and something lights up. There is a pause, a trial attempt at pronunciation, and often a laugh. The laugh is, in its way, a sign that the child has understood something about how language works — that words have rules, that rules can be played with, and that there is something pleasurable about a sound-combination that almost means something but doesn't.
Nonsense words have been present in literacy education and literary tradition for a long time. From Lewis Carroll's ‘Jabberwocky’ to phonics drills using strings like ‘zeb,’ ‘doth,’ and ‘mig,’ they occupy a curious middle space: structured enough to be language-like, meaningless enough to resist being read without genuinely understanding sound-letter relationships. What research is confirming is that this middle space is precisely where some of the most useful literacy development happens.
Research finds that nonsense word fluency reliably predicts reading success — because decoding without meaning is a pure test of the skills reading depends on
A nonsense word strips away the scaffolding that familiar vocabulary provides. When a child reads a real word, they may be drawing partly on memory, context, or visual pattern recognition. When they read a nonsense word, none of that is available. They have to apply their understanding of how letters map onto sounds, blend those sounds together, and produce a word they have never heard before. This is precisely the skill that reading relies on — and which, for some children, does not develop automatically (1, 4).
How quickly and accurately children can read nonsense words in the early years is a strong predictor of reading proficiency by the end of primary school — and of risk for reading difficulties including dyslexia (1, 2). Some evidence suggests this holds across different language backgrounds, pointing toward nonsense word fluency as a useful tool for assessing decoding ability in children who are learning to read in a second language (2).
The specific value of nonsense words is their meaninglessness. They cannot be recognised — only decoded. That makes them a purer measure of the skill they are designed to assess than any test that uses real words.
Brain imaging research has found that the same language networks involved in reading real words are active when children encounter nonsense words — specifically the networks involved in sound-processing, phonological analysis, and word recognition. The brain, it appears, applies its full reading machinery to nonsense words, treating them as words it simply hasn't encountered yet (4).
What nonsense words build — phonemic awareness, orthographic mapping, creative thinking, and the understanding that language has rules that can be explored
The most documented benefit of nonsense word work is phonemic awareness: the capacity to identify, segment, and blend the individual sounds within words. This is consistently one of the strongest predictors of early reading success, and it develops through exactly the kind of deliberate sound-by-sound processing that nonsense words require (1). Children with dyslexia, in particular, often rely on visual memory or context to compensate for weaker decoding — nonsense words remove those compensatory strategies and reveal the underlying phonological skill (4).
Beyond decoding, something else happens when children engage playfully with nonsense words. Inventing words, combining sounds in ways that produce new creatures or spells or feelings, testing the edges of what language allows — these activities develop what researchers call metalinguistic awareness: the understanding that language is a system with rules that can be examined, bent, and played with (7). A child who can invent a plausible-sounding word and laugh at an implausible one has understood something about linguistic structure that many children do not articulate until considerably later.
There is also an emotional dimension worth taking seriously. Researchers studying why some nonsense words are funnier than others have found consistent patterns in what makes certain sound-combinations amusing — rhythm, particular consonant clusters, and the quality of near-plausibility all seem to play a role (5). This emotional response to sound has a practical implication: children who find nonsense words genuinely funny tend to be more willing to take risks with unfamiliar sounds, more willing to guess and be wrong, and more engaged with the phonics work that nonsense words are designed to support.
Every culture has its own tradition of playful language — and these traditions do similar developmental work acrossvery differentlinguistic contexts
Playful engagement with language — with sounds that are almost-meaning, words that feel right without being real, patterns that satisfy without signifying — is not a Western or English-language phenomenon. In Japan, a rich category of language known as gitaigo and giongo uses sound-symbolic words to describe states, textures, and feelings in ways that formal vocabulary does not capture. Many of these words would be considered nonsense in English but carry precise emotional and sensory meaning within Japanese.
In many African and Caribbean oral traditions, riddles, tongue twisters, and nonsense verses are tools for teaching rhythm, phonological pattern, and the pleasure of language — used well before formal literacy instruction begins. Scandinavian early reading materials have long incorporated reduplication and rhythmic repetition to build phonological awareness through playful sound. And British English, with its long tradition of regional slang, nursery rhymes, and deliberate whimsy — from ‘codswallop’ to ‘higgledy-piggledy' — has a particular cultural history of allowing invented or near-invented words to carry genuine social meaning (6).
These traditions treat playful language as serious and one of the routes into learning rather than a distraction from it. The cultures that have maintained strong oral traditions of sound-play have, often without knowing the research, been supporting exactly the phonological capacities that reading development depends on.
Nonsense words can confuse as well as build — and knowing when and how to introduce them matters as much as knowing why they work
There is a little worry in how nonsense words are used in literacy education that the research is clear about: introduced without adequate scaffolding, they can produce confusion rather than insight — particularly for children who are already struggling with reading, and those for whom the English sound system is not yet familiar (4). A child who is unsure whether a word is real or invented, or who has not yet consolidated the sound-letter relationships being tested, may find nonsense word tasks disorienting rather than illuminating.
This is an argument for how they are introduced. The research consistently finds that nonsense word tasks are most effective when children understand the purpose — when they know that the word is invented, that their job is not to find its meaning but to sound it out, and that being wrong is part of the process rather than evidence of failure. The playful, risk-friendly atmosphere that makes nonsense words enjoyable in a game context is the same atmosphere that makes them effective in a literacy context.
There is also a cultural and linguistic dimension to hold. Phonotactic rules — the rules that determine what sound sequences are possible in a language — vary across languages. A nonsense word that sounds plausible to a native English speaker may sound highly implausible, or even like a real word, to a child whose phonological frame of reference is a different language. Assessment tools using nonsense words should be interpreted with awareness of the child's full linguistic context (2).
What supports effective engagement with nonsense words — in classrooms and at home
The conditions that make nonsense word engagement most effective tend to be the same as those that make playful language most enjoyable: low stakes, genuine fun, a willingness to be wrong, and an adult who models that getting it slightly wrong is interesting rather than embarrassing.
Some patterns that many families and educators have found useful to support nonsense word engagement:
Make the purpose explicit. Children, and particularly children who find reading difficult, tend to engage better with nonsense word tasks when they understand what is happening. Knowing that the word is invented, that there is no correct answer to find in memory, and that the task is specifically about the sounds rather than the meaning, couldreduce anxiety and increase the willingness to attempt (4).
Let the play be genuinely playful. Nonsense words produce the most learning when children are allowed to find them funny, to invent their own, to use them in stories and games, and to experience the pleasure of a particularly good-sounding invented word. The emotional engagement is not separate from the learning — researchers find it increases memory retention and risk-taking in literacy tasks (5).
Introduce gradually for children who find reading hard. For children who are already anxious about reading, or who are working through difficulties with decoding, nonsense words benefit from careful sequencing — introduced with support, alongside real words that consolidate what is being practised, and with enough time to understand what the task requires before fluency is assessed (1, 4).
Draw on the playful language traditions children bring. Inviting children to share sound-play from their own linguistic background — tongue twisters, invented words, family nicknames, rhythmic games — widen the frame of what counts as interesting language and make the nonsense word work feel connected to something children already value rather than imposed from outside (6).
At home, follow the enjoyment. Swapping syllables in familiar words, inventing names for imaginary creatures, asking what a particular invented sound might feel like or smell like — these low-structure games build the same phonological and metalinguistic capacities that more formal nonsense word tasks develop, without the formal context (7).
The giggle at 'snizzlepop' is doing real work — and understanding that changes how adults relate to children's language play
The next time a child dissolves over a particularly satisfying invented word — or produces one themselves with evident pride — there is something worth pausing on. What they are doing in that moment is working with the structure of language: testing its edges, enjoying its rules, and practicing the phonological analysis that reading will demand of them.
The pleasure is the point. Or rather — the pleasure is what makes the point possible. Nonsense words work in literacy development because they are genuinely fun, because they invite risk-taking and experimentation, because they make the abstract relationship between letters and sounds feel like a game rather than a test. When that playful quality is maintained — when the silliness is honoured rather than managed away — the serious business of reading development tends to follow.
References:
[1] Fien H, et al. An examination of the relation of nonsense word fluency initial status and gains to reading outcomes for beginning readers. Sch Psychol Rev. 2010;39(4):631–653. https://doi.org/10.1080/02796015.2010.12087747
[2] Fien H, et al. Using nonsense word fluency to predict reading proficiency in kindergarten through second grade for English learners and native English speakers. Sch Psychol Rev. 2008;37(3):391–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/02796015.2008.12087885
[7] Knight RA. Transcribing nonsense words: the effect of numbers of voices and repetitions. Clin Linguist Phon. 2010;24(6):473–484. https://doi.org/10.3109/02699200903491267
