Orthographic rimes as functional units of reading in fourth-grade children

Abstract

Two experiments are described, both using substitution priming to investigate the hypothesis that orthographic rime units serve as functional units of word recognition for fourth-grade children. In Experiment 1, prime-target pairs were presented in blocks of similar prime type. As predicted, substitution priming was observed only when the prime word shared the final trigram (rime unit) with the target word (weed-seed). Words which shared the initial trigram with the target, and either the same (lean-leap) or different (pine-pink) grapheme-phoneme correspondences, were ineffective primes. In Experiment 2, word pairs with differing prime-target relationships were randomly distributed within the stimulus set. No facilitative effects of substitution priming were observed. Taken together, these experiments indicate that children at this level of reading development can use orthographic rime units in word recognition, but mat the use of orthographic rime units is not yet automatised.