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

Reflections on onset-rime and phoneme sensitivity as predictors of beginning word reading

Rival claims have been made concerning the importance of rime sensitivity as a predictor of early word reading skill. Hulme et al. (2002) suggested that phoneme sensitivity is more strongly predictive of word reading ability than is onset-rime sensitivity. An examination of two independent data sets suggests that, although onset-rime sensitivity typically predicts school entrants' later word reading skill, phoneme sensitivity does predict more variation. However, multiple regression analyses do not reveal the level of phonological sensitivity that children need in order to understand alphabetic reading instruction. This issue is crucial to the detection of children at risk for reading failure and for the design of intervention programs for these children. A different analytic strategy is described for addressing this issue.

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.

Spelling Development and Disability

This article reviews the literature on normal and impaired spelling development in English. Once children begin to learn that the function of alphabetic writing is to represent the sounds of language, they go through the process of learning sound-spelling correspondences in increasingly fine detail. Continued experience with print allows children to learn about orthographic and morphological conventions of the language. Within this general framework, the authors describe research that underscores the importance of fine-grained linguistic analyses of spelling performance. It is concluded that such an approach holds a great deal of promise for theory and practice.

Learning a novel grapheme: effects of positional and phonemic context on children's spelling

Two experiments explored how children who encounter a new spelling for a phoneme generalize it to novel items. Children ages 5 1/2 to 9 (N = 123) were taught a CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) nonword containing a new vowel spelling in the middle position (e.g., /gaik/ is spelled as giik). They were then asked to spell other nonwords containing the vowel or to judge spellings that had supposedly been produced by younger children. Children were sensitive to position in the spelling production task, being more likely to use the novel grapheme when the vowel appeared in the middle of a CVC target than when it appeared in word-initial or word-final position. Children were not significantly more likely to use the novel grapheme when the target shared the vowel and final consonant (rime) of the training stimulus than when it shared the initial consonant and vowel. Implications for views of spelling development are discussed.