The word intelligibility test for dysarthric speakers was designed to examine phonetic contrasts that are likely (1) to be sensitive to intelligibility impairment and (2) to contribute significantly to speech intelligibility. These phonetically contrasting word pairs were tested and proved to be reliable and to be valid, The results showed that in Korean dysarthric patients, the percentage of error in final position contrast was higher than in any other position. Unlike the results of previous studies, the initial-position contrasts were crucial in predicting the overall intelligibility among Korean patients.