Orthographic Analogies Research Articles

Beginning Readers’ Use of Orthographic Analogies in Word Reading

This research re-investigated the claim that beginning readers exploit information from the orthographic rime of clue words to help them to decode unfamiliar words. In Experiment 1, first-grade children were equally able to use orthographic information from the beginning, middle, and end of clue words to identify unfamiliar target words. Moreover, the improvement in reading end- (or orthographic rime-) same target words following clue word presentation reflected phonological priming. In second-grade children, with correction for retesting effects, improvement following clue word presentation for end-same and beginning-same target words was equivalent, although end-same target words improved more than middle-same target words. In Experiment 2, both first- and second-grade children were able to use orthographic information from the beginning, middle, and end of clue words to identify unfamiliar words. Clue word presentation enhanced the reading of beginning-same and end-same target words more than middle-same target words. Improvement was the same for beginning-same and end-same target words. Target word improvement following clue word presentation was greater than that for phonologically primed words only in children reading target words sharing the beginning sequence of the clue word.

Effects of rime-based orthographic analogy training on the word recognition skills of children with reading disability.

The aim of this study was to determine whether metacognitive strategy training in the use of rime spelling units would be an effective intervention strategy for children with reading disability. Thirty-six disabled readers were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 training groups, a rime analogy training group or an item-specific training group. Posttreatment measures were taken at the completion of the training, and 1-year follow-up data were obtained from the 2 training groups and a sample of 20 normally developing readers. Systematic strategy training in the use of rime spelling units produced generalized achievement gains and transfer to uninstructed materials and was more effective than training that focused on item-specific learning and sentence-level strategies. The superior posttreatment performance of the rime analogy group over the item-specific group was maintained.

Orthographic analogies and developmental dyslexia.

Goswami (1986, 1988) has demonstrated that children can use orthographic analogies (particularly at the onset-rime level) between the spelling patterns in words to help to decode new words (e.g. using 'beak' to read 'peak'). This strategy has been shown in children as young as six years old. Since it is known that children with developmental dyslexia find it particularly difficult to read words that they have not been specifically taught (Lovett, Warren-Chaplin, Ransby & Borden, 1990), the present study investigated whether dyslexic children might be unable to use analogies. Employing a design similar to that used by Goswami (1988), it was hypothesized that dyslexics would find it difficult to transfer spontaneously knowledge of a 'clue' word to decode new words that could be read by analogy with the clue word. The results of Expt 1 indicated that the dyslexic readers read significantly fewer of the analogous words than a reading age-matched comparison group of younger children. Furthermore, none of the nine dyslexic children read as many of the analogous words as the lowest scoring control child. In a second experiment, a design similar to that of Muter, Snowling & Taylor (1994) was used with a new and larger sample of dyslexic children. In this experiment, all the children were brought to criterion in reading the clue words before the analogous words were presented. Once again, the dyslexic children read significantly fewer words that were analogous with the clue words than did a reading age-matched comparison group. The number of analogous words that the dyslexic children read was significantly correlated with their performance on a test that is sensitive to the ability to detect rhyme. It is argued that a failure to make analogies may be one of the main causes of the reading impairment experienced by children with developmental dyslexia.

Effects of rime-based orthographic analogy training on the word recognition skills of children with reading disability.

Effects of rime-based orthographic analogy training on the word recognition skills of children with reading disability.

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

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.

Rhyming ability, phoneme identity, letter–sound knowledge, and the use of orthographic analogy by prereaders.

Two current models of the use of orthographic analogy claim that (a) beginning readers can make orthographic analogies based on rhyming and (b) considrable experience recoding individual letter sequences involving phonemes is a prerequisite. The study tested the first model and had implicatons for the second model. Rhyming, phoneme identity, letter-sound knowledge, and vocabulary were measured in 66 prereaders with a mean age of 5 years 8 months. Children then received teaching that varied experience with onset and rime and with wordds with the spelling intact or segmented. The study produced evidence that children with high-prereading skills can make orthographic analogies when beginning to read. However, final phneme identity, not rhyming, was the best discriminator between children who read analogy test words and those who did not. The evidence supports a synthesis of the two models.

Rhyming ability, phoneme identity, letter-sound knowledge, and the use of orthographic analogy by prereaders.

Rhyming ability, phoneme identity, letter-sound knowledge, and the use of orthographic analogy by prereaders.

Orthographic Analogy Training with Kindergarten Children: Effects on Analogy Use, Phonemic Segmentation, and Letter-Sound Knowledge

This study investigated the effect of teaching children orthographic analogies based on onset and rime units (words that rhyme). Forty-eight kindergarten children were selected for the study and classified as high, middle, or low segmenters based on their performance on the Test of Awareness of Language Segments (TALS) (Sawyer, 1987). Pretraining and posttraining measures consisted of segmentation ability, letter-sound knowledge, and reading words by analogy. Although the experimental group showed significant gains on each measure over no-training controls, analogy training affected children differently depending upon their prior segmentation level. Low segmenters gained most in segmentation ability with small, but significant, effects in letter-sound knowledge. Middle and high segmenters showed greatest improvement in their ability to perform the word reading by analogy task and in their letter-sound knowledge. This study provides support for a role for onset and rime units in beginning reading and may indicate how rhymes contribute to children's awareness of phonemes.

Phonological priming and orthographic analogies in reading

Recent work has demonstrated that children can use orthographic analogies between the spelling patterns in words to help in decoding new words (e.g., using beak to read peak; Goswami, 1986, 1988). However, one objection has been that these analogy effects may be due to phonological priming. Two experiments examined the phonological priming alternative. In Experiment 1, a single word reading task compared the use of analogies to read words that shared both orthography and phonology (e.g., most-post), that shared orthography only (e.g., most-cost), or that shared phonology only (e.g. most-toast—the phonological priming condition). Limited effects of phonological priming were found. Experiment 2 then presented the same words embedded in prose passages—“real reading”. While the orthographic analogy effect remained robust, the small phonological priming effect disappeared. It is argued that phonological priming is an insufficient explanation of the analogy effect at the single word level, and plays no role in the use of analogies in story reading.

A Special Link between Rhyming Skill and the Use of Orthographic Analogies by Beginning Readers

The existence of a strong correlation between phonological awareness and the development of reading has long been known. More recently, it has been shown that pre-reading rhyming skills are the best predictor of later reading ability that we have. One reason for this relationship may be that children who have put words into rhyming categories before they begin school may be quick to realize that these words also tend to share the same spelling patterns, and may then use such similarities in spelling to make predictions (analogies) about how new written words will sound. The present study tests one aspect of this hypothesis, which is that children who make more analogies in reading are also better at rhyming than children who do not. Evidence consistent with this prediction is presented.

Orthographic Analogies and Reading Development

Given the interest in the use of orthographic analogies in skilled reading, the role of analogies in reading development has received surprisingly little attention. The experiments presented here examine three important developmental issues: whether beginning readers can make orthographic analogies, how the consistency of spelling–sound relations affects this ability, and whether orthographic analogies are used in reading prose. It is concluded that orthographic analogies have an important role to play in reading development, and some suggestions are offered as to why this may be so.

Children's use of analogy in learning to spell

While recent work has shown that young children can use analogies to read new words from an early age (e.g. using ‘beak’ to read ‘peak’ Goswami, 1986), it has been suggested that orthographic analogies are not made in spelling until later in development (Campbell, 1985; Marsh & Desberg, 1983). Exp 1 showed that this was not the case, as children at the beginning stages of learning to spell (7 years) could make analogies from a clue word to new words. Exp 2 examined whether analogies in spelling could also be made from stored spelling knowledge. Two subsidiary questions were also considered: whether spelling‐sound consistency would affect children's use of analogy, as it does in reading (Goswami, 1987, in press), and how children decide whether an analogy in spelling is appropriate: while an analogy from ‘beak’ to ‘peak’ is valid in spelling, one from ‘beak’ to ‘meek’ is not. It is suggested that children may use their reading knowledge to decide whether an analogy is appropriate in spelling.