Onset/rime sensitivity and orthographic analogies in normal and poor readers

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study was designed to determine whether there was a relationship between the ease with which children make use of orthographic analogies and their progress in learning to read. The results of an experiment using a reading age match design showed that poor readers performed as well as normal readers on orally presented measures of onset/rime sensitivity, but less well on visually/orally presented rhyme tasks. The poor readers also performed less well than the normal readers on a task that measured the children's ability to take advantage of analogical units when reading lists of words: these reading lists contained groups of words that differed according to (1) whether the words containing the common unit were presented contiguously or noncontiguously, and (2) whether the unit constituted the rime portion of the words or was embedded within the rime portion of the words. A follow-up intervention study demonstrated that poor readers who received instruction in the use of orthographic analogies achieved higher reading accuracy scores on subsequent readings than did a matched group of poor readers who received standard remedial instruction in context cue usage.