Sublexical Inferences in Beginning Reading: Medial Vowel Digraphs as Functional Units of Transfer

Rimes and superrimes: An exploration of children's disyllabic rhyming skills

The study investigated the extension of rhyme awareness to disyllabic stimuli. Three experiments are reported which examine the disyllabic rhyme production skills of adults and of children in their first, second or third year of schooling. Stress pattern and phonological rime and superrime neighbourhood density were manipulated. Rhyming skills were influenced by stress pattern. With initial stress, rhyming responses were based predominantly on the superrime but with final stress, rhyming responses variously shared the superrime, the final syllable and the final rime unit with the target. Neighbourhood density affected the likelihood of production of a real word rhyming response. Some implications for the organization of an orthographic lexicon of multisyllables are discussed.

Orthographic learning via self-teaching in children learning to read English: Effects of exposure, durability, and context

This experiment investigated orthographic learning via self-teaching in 8- and 9-year-olds learning to read English. Children were exposed to novel words, and following a 1- or 7-day delay interval, orthographic learning was assessed by asking children to select previously seen novel words from an array of visually and phonologically similar foils. Novel words were exposed either in meaningful text or in isolation, and number of exposures was manipulated with each novel word appearing once, twice, or four times. Learning increased as a function of number of exposures, although some evidence of durable one-trial learning was observed. Context played no role, suggesting that orthographic learning is not dependent on meaning-based information. In general, these findings offer support for the central aspects of Share's self-teaching hypothesis. However, although we observed a general relation between phonological decoding and orthographic learning, the relation did not hold at an item-by-item level of analysis, suggesting that a strong version of Share's item-based account is not correct.

Explicit phoneme training combined with phonic reading instruction helps young children at risk of reading failure

BACKGROUND

We evaluate the effectiveness of three theoretically motivated programmes for the teaching of reading to four-year-old children.

METHOD

Four hundred and ten children, of pre-kindergarten age, in 20 UK Reception-year classrooms were divided into four matched groups and randomly assigned to one of three experimental teaching conditions, Reading with Rhyme, Reading with Phoneme, Reading with Rhyme and Phoneme, or to a taught control condition (Reading). In each condition the Reading element contained a strong phonic component.

RESULTS

There were no selective effects of the different experimental teaching programmes for normally developing children. However, for those children identified as being at risk of reading failure, training in phoneme skills resulted in selective gains in phoneme awareness and in reading skills.

CONCLUSIONS

A reading programme that contains a highly structured phonic component is sufficient for most 4.5-year-old children to master the alphabetic principle and to learn to read effectively, without additional explicit phonological training. In contrast, for young children at risk of reading delay, additional training in phoneme awareness and linking phonemes with letters is beneficial.

What do children do in the rime-analogy task? An examination of the skills and strategies used by early readers

Despite the intense debate surrounding the use of orthographic analogy in the clue word paradigm, little is known about the skills and strategies children actually use and how these compare with their everyday reading of single words. This study, with 4- and 5-year-olds (N=125), supports previous work which suggests children rely on phonological, rather than orthographic, priming in the clue word task since children most frequently produced rhyming words in response to the clue word. The extent to which phoneme and rhyme-based skills, along with letter-sound knowledge, predicted children's performance in the analogy task and in a test of single word reading was contrasted and compared. Our findings suggested that the balance of skills which children drew upon was determined by the demands of the task. The implications of these findings for the validity of the 'orthographic'-analogy task and for teaching beginning readers is discussed.

The limitations of orthographic analogy in early reading development: performance on the clue-word task depends on phonological priming and elementary decoding skill, not the use of orthographic analogy

Two experiments investigated the mechanisms underlying analogical transfer in the clue-word reading task developed by Goswami and her colleagues. Across both experiments, an equivalent number of "analogy" responses were made regardless of whether the clue word was seen or just heard. In addition, the number of "analogy" responses to words sharing both orthographic and phonological overlap with the clue words was no greater than that shown to words sharing only pronunciations. These results provide no evidence for the view that beginning readers make genuine orthographic-based analogies. Instead, the findings are interpreted within a framework in which phonological priming, in combination with the children's own partial decoding attempts based on limited orthographic knowledge, account for their performance on the clue-word task. It is concluded that the extent to which beginning readers make orthographic analogies is overestimated and as a consequence, theories that emphasize the importance of orthographic analogy as a mechanism driving the development of early reading skills need to be questioned.

Units of analysis in nonword reading: evidence from children and adults

Four experiments examined variations in children's (chronological age range: 5 years 7 months to 9 years 10 months) and adults' reading strategy as a function of task demands. Experiment 1 found that less skilled readers (mean reading age: 8 years 8 months), though able to make use of rime-based spelling-to-sound correspondences (reading "by analogy"), predominantly used simple grapheme-phoneme-level correspondences in reading isolated unfamiliar items. Skilled children (mean reading age: 11 years 6 months) were more likely to adopt an analogy strategy. Experiments 2 and 3 adopted versions of the "clue word" technique used by U. Goswami (1986, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 42, 73-83; 1988, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 40A, 239-268) and found a much higher incidence of analogical responding by children of all ages, suggesting that reading strategy is task-dependent. Experiment 4 showed that adults' nonword-reading strategy is determined by list composition, in that grapheme-phoneme correspondences are used more when the list context contains nonwords. It is concluded that both adults and young children exhibit considerable flexibility and task-dependence in the levels of spelling-to-sound correspondence (analogies vs decoding) that they use and that grapheme-phoneme correspondences are preferred when maximum generalization to unfamiliar items is required.

The limitations of orthographic rime analogies in beginners' word reading: a reply to Goswami (1999)

U. Goswami (1999, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 72, 210-219) argues that the findings of J. A. Bowey, L. Vaughan, and J. Hansen (1998, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 68, 108-133) are uninterpretable. This paper examines each of Goswami's criticisms of the methodology employed by Bowey et al. (1998). None can explain the differential analogy and phonological priming effects reported by Bowey et al. More fundamentally, none can explain the critical finding of Bowey et al. that, when phonological priming effects are controlled, the size of the end analogy effect is no greater than that of beginning and medial vowel analogy effects. Furthermore, some of Goswami's criticisms cast considerable doubt on the generalizability of findings from her version of the clue word task.