While words of learned length, and thundering sound
Amaz'd the gazing rustics rang'd around;
And still they gaz'd, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, l. 211
The tests below constitute a series designed to assess your ability to discern differences in the individual sounds that are present in English words when those words are given in written form.
Each test has 10 items. In each item, you will be given five words, and your task is to identify the one word that lacks an individual sound that occurs in each of the other four words.
These tests are an assessment of the ability to decode the pronunciation of a written word, analyze a pronunciation in terms of its phonemes (individual sounds), and synthesize this information in working memory to determine which pronunciation differs from the others. These tests require a keen understanding of the pronunciation of English words as well as the individuation of the phonemes of English.
The item type found in these tests is only infrequently found on professional intelligence tests. One similar test can be found in this paper. In John B. Carroll's magisterial work on cognitive abilities (p. 173), he describes this test as follows:
In [the Phonological Oddity task], the child has to identify which of four words (presented auditorily) is different from the rest in not containing a common sound (e.g., in the set bet, nut, get, and let).Note the differences: in the test described, words are presented auditorily, and the test is designed for children and is therefore significantly easier than the tests hosted here.