Rhyme Detection Research Articles

Sensitivity to Onset and Rhyme Does Predict Young Children's Reading: A Comment on Muter, Hulme, Snowling, and Taylor (1997)

Muter, Hulme, Snowling, and Taylor (1997) claimed that measures of phoneme segmentation, and not measures of rhyme, predict young children's reading. They base this claim on the relative predictive success of two rhyme and two phoneme segmentation tasks. However, there is a problem with one of their two rhyme measures, the Rhyme Detection measure. The children were asked to select a choice word which “rhymes with or sounds like” a target word, but the authors only scored rhyme choices (“boat”–“coat”) as correct. Choices of words with the same onset as the target (“train”–“tractor”) were counted as mistakes, even though these latter choices also shared a common sound with the target. A better way to score the task is to count onset as well as rhyme choices as correct. The new score predicts reading and spelling as well as the phoneme tasks. This result is consistent with the hypothesis of Goswami and Bryant (1990) that sensitivity to onset and rhyme, as well as awareness of phonemes, plays a part in children's success in reading and to spelling.

Segmentation Does Predict Early Progress in Learning to Read Better Than Rhyme: A Reply to Bryant

In our recent paper (Muter, Hulme, Snowling, & Taylor, 1997) we argued that measures of segmentation were better predictors of early progress in learning to read than were measures of rhyme. Bryant (1998, this issue), in his comment on our paper, has argued that this conclusion is flawed because the instructions used in our rhyme detection measure included the phrase “rhymes with or sounds like.” We present new data showing that the instructions used do not have the effect Bryant claims: asking children which word “rhymes with” or which word “rhymes with or sounds like” a target word produces identical patterns of responses. We argue that Bryant's new measure derived from our data simply reflects children's global sensitivity to the similarity in sound between different words and that this measure provides no convincing support for his conclusion that sensitivity to onset and rime is a predictor of children's success in learning to read. We conclude that the data in our paper, as well as other recent evidence, support the view that measures of phonemic segmentation are better predictors of early reading skills than are measures of onset–rime sensitivity.

Segmentation, Not Rhyming, Predicts Early Progress in Learning to Read

We present a longitudinal study of children in the first 2 years of learning to read. A battery of tests of phonological skills administered when the children were prereaders identified two distinct and relatively independent factors, Rhyming (defined by measures of rhyme detection and rhyme production) and Segmentation (defined by measures of phoneme identification and phoneme deletion). Segmentation was strongly correlated with attainment in reading and spelling at the end of the first year at school, while Rhyming was not. In addition, letter name knowledge predicted both reading and spelling skill and showed an interactive effect with children's segmentation skills. By the end of the second year of school, however, rhyming had started to exert a predictive effect on spelling, but not on reading. The results are discussed in the context of current theories of the role of phonological skills in learning to read.

Poor readers' ability to detect speech rhythm and perceive rapid speech

Recent research indicates that the rhythmic properties of speech may indicate to the infant listener where word boundaries are most likely to occur. However, rhythmic awareness is not included in present discussions of phonological awareness. It is suggested that skills which develop in early infancy to facilitate speech perception (i.e. awareness of rhythm) may have an impact upon later phonological development and literacy. This paper outlines a cross‐sectional study, designed to examine whether poor readers do show a specific insensitivity to rhythm in speech, and whether they also exhibit signs of inefficient speech perception. Thirty primary school children identified as poor readers were matched for age and gender, and for reading age and gender with two groups of children reading at a level comparable with their chronological age (“normal” readers) (N = 90). All children completed a battery of tasks, including an assessment of rapid speech perception, rhythmic awareness, rhyme detection and phoneme deletion. The results suggest that poor readers do experience a developmental delay on rhythmic awareness, although there is no significant difference in the children's ability to perceive speech once vocabulary is taken into account. Suggestions are made regarding the need to consider non‐segmental skills in definitions of phonological awareness, and how this may contribute to our understanding of phonological development.

Preschool Phonological Awareness and Subsequent Literacy Development

There is an unresolved debate in the developmental literature regarding whether phonemic awareness is acquired naturally as part of phonological awareness, or whether it is instead an artefact of reading tuition. This ambiguity affects the interpretation of studies which show that pre‐literate phonemic awareness is a powerful predictor of literacy attainment in school. There is also evidence to suggest that spoken word recognition might contribute to literacy development. The present study therefore initially assessed 30 preschool, pre‐literate children on a battery of tests designed to provide a profile of pre‐literate phonological awareness. The reading and spelling ability of these children was then monitored at the end of each school term for five terms. Results suggest that young children can develop phonemic awareness before beginning reading or attending school, and that children's pre‐literate rhyme detection ability is the best predictor of initial reading development. Spoken word recognition also contributed to spelling ability at the end of the first term in school. Spelling ability was consistently found to be superior to reading ability throughout the duration of the study. These results are suggested to support the idea that word recognition plays an early, but important, role in the initial development of spelling ability and that spelling facilitates the development of alphabetic awareness in children's reading. The results generally support growing evidence that rhyme awareness is associated with literacy as a predictor and discriminates between good and poor readers.

Memory for rote linguistic routines and sensitivity to rhyme: A comparison of low-income children with and without specific language impairment

ABSTRACTThis report describes two studies on memory for rote linguistic sequences and sensitivity to rhyme in young children with and without language impairment. In the first study, 10 low income kindergarteners with specific language impairment (SLI) were compared with age- and income-matched classmates on reciting common nursery rhymes, reciting the alphabet, and rote counting. Children with SLI displayed lower performance on most of the rote linguistic sequence tasks, especially on (heir knowledge of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. The second study examined the learning and retention of nursery rhymes in 8 young children with SLI after 6 weeks of classroom instruction. Low-income, 4- and 5-year-old children with SLI and their age- and income-matched classmates were taught five novel Mother Goose rhymes during a large-group classroom activity. Children were tested before and after the intervention on their ability to recite nursery rhymes and to detect rhyme. When compared with their peers, children with SLI had difficulty repeating the nursery rhymes, despite daily classroom exposure. Although the performance of children with SLI on rhyme recitation and detection tasks was poor, their relative performance was better on a cloze task based on the set of nursery rhymes. The results of this study suggest that children with SLI have difficulty storing and/or retrieving lines of memorized text. Traditional informal techniques for teaching rote linguistic sequences may need to be modified to give children with SLI more opportunities to practice rote sequences.

Segmentation, Not Rhyming, Predicts Early Progress in Learning to Read

We present a longitudinal study of children in the first two years of learning to read. A battery of tests of phonological skills administered when the children were prereaders identified two distinct and relatively independent factors, Rhyming (defined by measures of rhyme detection and rhyme production) and Segmentation (defined by measures of phoneme identification and phoneme deletion). Segmentation was strongly correlated with attainment in reading and spelling at the end of the first year at school, though Rhyming was not. In addition, letter name knowledge predicted both reading and spelling skill and showed an interactive effect with children's segmentation skills. By the end of the second year of school, however, rhyming had started to exert a predictive effect on spelling, but not on reading. The results are discussed in the context of current theories of the role of phonological skills in learning to read.

Investigating speech processing skills in young children

ABSTRACT This paper stresses the need to refer to normal control data when assessing children with speech disorders. It is based on the findings of a completed, one‐year, full‐time research project designed to investigate the normal development of speech, auditory and rhyme skills within a psycholinguistic framework (Stackhouse & Wells, 1993). The aim of the project was to examine phonological processing skills in normally developing children for comparison with children presenting with speech, lexical and literacy disorders. A range of tasks was presented to 100 normally developing children, aged 3–7 years. The tasks included auditory discrimination, rhyme judgement, detection and production; speech repetition, naming and continuous speech. The tasks were presented in both visual and auditory modalities, and both real and non‐word stimuli were used. For each set of tasks stimuli were identical or closely matched, using phonetic criteria. Data was analysed for subjects within each age band, i.e. 3‐year‐olds, 4‐year‐olds, 5‐year‐olds, 6‐year‐olds and 7‐year‐olds. Analysis of variance revealed significant effects of age on all tasks. Comparisons were made of performance across the different presentations and stimuli‐type relevant to each task and significant effects of presentation and stimuli‐type were found for some tasks but not for all comparisons made. These findings allowed us to present a profile of normal development in performance across a range of input and output processing tasks. The time constraint prevents the full profile of results being included. However, the implications of the results for clinical practice will be presented. For example, given that normally developing children find non‐word repetition more difficult than real‐word repetition, at what point is the difference in performance on these tasks indicative of a motor programming deficit? Further, given the relationship between rhyme detection and production skills in normally developing children, at what age is the failure to produce any rhyming words significant? In summary, this study identified typical developmental profiles of phonological processing skills in children of 3–7 years of age. Speech and language therapists can use these results to identify with greater accuracy children with speech and language difficulties who may present with atypical psycholinguistic profiles. Subsequent therapy can be targeted in a more precise way.

Phonological awareness and beginning reading: evaluation of a school-based screening procedure.

Experimental phonological synthesis and analysis tasks were administered to children in the spring preceding their kindergarten entry. End-of-kindergarten, end-of-first-grade, and end-of-second-grade measures of beginning reading were collected for the group of 76 children (39 boys, 37 girls). Screening data for the 76 children were correlated with interim measures and standardized reading-performance measures that were administered at the end of second grade. The first experimental task, a phonological-synthesis task (sound blending), was significantly related to most of the interim and outcome measures. The phonological analysis task (rhyme detection) was related to fewer measures of beginning reading.

The Development and Cross-Language Transfer of Phonological Awareness

Our research examined whether phonological awareness skills develop in a specific pattern, and once developed, whether they transfer to another language. Experiment 1 attempted to replicate previous findings that rhyme (rime) detection is easier than initial and final phoneme detection and to determine whether the order of tasks would affect performance. English-speaking and Spanish-speaking first grade students were given the three tasks in both English and Spanish. Performance was best on rhymes and task order was not a factor. Experiment 2 evaluated a developmental progression hypothesis that rime awareness is a building block for other forms of awareness. English-speaking and Spanish-speaking first grade students were given English and Spanish tasks from Experiment 1 on two occasions. English- and Spanish-speaking kindergarten students were given tasks only in their native language. Accuracy and response time were recorded. The pattern of results provided support for a developmental progression in the acquisition of phonogical awareness. Results also indicated that cross-language transfer can be detected in skills that are still developing. A theoretical explanation for the developmental pattern of phonological awareness and educational implications are provided.

Rhyme Perception: Global or Analytical?

Preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children who performed above chance level on a relatively easy rhyme-categorization task were given a second rhyme-categorization task that seems to require some analytical effort for successful performance. The children were also administered a version of the initial-consonant-deletion task. The results suggest that rhyme detection does not involve attention to segments. Nor does it necessarily involve precise identification of the segment shared by rhyming words. Whether rhyme perception involves some level of analysis may, to a large extent, depend on the subject′s reading level. The implications of these results for the controversy over the phonological operations presupposed by young children′s ability to detect rhyme are discussed. It is suggested that rhyme detection may be best described in terms of a sensitivity to some sort of global phonological similarity.

Failure to activate the left temporoparietal cortex in dyslexia. An oxygen 15 positron emission tomographic study.

To test the hypothesis of left temporoparietal dysfunction in dyslexia, suggested by neuropsychological and neuropathologic data, cerebral blood flow was measured with positron emission tomography in 14 right-handed men with severe developmental dyslexia (mean [SD] age, 27 [5] years; median reading level, fifth grade) and 14 matched controls at rest and during an auditory phonologic task (rhyme detection) and an auditory attention task involving the detection of target tones. As expected, normal readers activated left temporoparietal cortex during rhyme detection but not during the nonphonologic attentional task. Dyslexic men failed to activate those left temporoparietal regions activated in controls during rhyme detection but did not differ from controls in these regions during rest or attentional testing. Thus, the expected left temporoparietal dysfunction was demonstrated only when specific probes for these regions were employed.

The orthographic code: Developmental trends in reading-disabled and normally-achieving children

An auditory rhyme detection task was employed to examine orthographic code development in 27 reading-disabled (RD) and 27 normally-achieving (NA) children ranging in age from 7-0 to 11-5. The amount of orthographic facilitation (that is, the reduction in response latencies for orthographically similar as opposed to orthographically dissimilar rhyme pairs) was recorded for each subject. Results indicated that RD children exhibit significantly less facilitation overall than NA children and that RD children do not demonstrate comparable orthographic facilitation effects to NA children until they are about two years older than their NA peers. It is concluded that children with a reading disability have a lessened ability to access automatically and make available stored lexical information relating to orthography.

A Strategy for Assessing Problems in Word Recognition among Dyslexics

Abstract The article argues for the importance of studying word‐recognition strategies in the assessment of dyslexia. The consensus model of word recognition in cognitive neuropsychology, the dual‐route model, is critically discussed in the light of attacks from computational models in modern connectionism. Despite the criticism, it is argued that a dual‐route model can serve important functions in the context of dyslexia assessment. We propose a specific version of the dual‐route model from which we construct a series of tasks for diagnosing subprocesses in word recognition. A computer‐based test battery is described, involving oral reading tasks, lexical decision, rhyme detection, letter categorization, visual analysis, naming, and semantic categorization. Latencies and accuracy scores are recorded. The usefulness of this assessment approach is demonstrated in two case studies of 15‐year‐old dyslexic boys.

Literacy training and speech segmentation

New groups of illiterate and ex-illiterate adults, comparable to those of Morais et. al (1979), were given a battery of tasks designed to assess the specificity of the effect of literacy training on speech segmentation. As in the previous study, a strong difference was observed between the two groups on the task of deleting the initial consonant of an utterance. The illeterates displayed the same incapacity to deal with phonetic segments in a detection task and in a progressive free segmentation task. Their performance was better, although still inferior to that of ex-illiterates, on both deletion and detection when the critical unit was a syllable rather than a consonant, as well as in a task of rhyme detection. No significant difference was observed in a task of melody segmentation, on which both groups performed poorly. The high specificity of the differences in performance level implies that they cannot result to an important extent from differences in general ability or motivation between the two groups of subjects. They rather mean that while sensitivity to rhyme and analysis into syllables can develop up to some point in the absence of the experience normally provided by reading instruction, analysis into phonetic segments requires that experience. Finally, in a picture memory task, the illiterates showed a phonological similarity effect, which is consistent with other results suggesting that the use of phonological codes for short-term retention does not require explicit phonetic analysis.

Reconstructive retrieval deficits in Broca's aphasia

Anterior aphasic patients' ability to utilize the phonemic and/or semantic features of verbal material for retention purposes was investigated. In the first experiment, patients were asked to either detect word repetitions, phoneme repetitions, or rhymes in a list of items. The aphasics performed well on word and phoneme repetition detection but below both normals and amnesic Korsakoffs on rhyme detection. In the second experiment the patients were instructed to analyze either the physical, phonemic, or semantic features of words they were later asked to recognize. Aphasics were differentially affected (as were normals) by these instructions: semantic feature analysis resulted in the best performance, followed by phonemic feature analysis. It was concluded that anterior aphasics can analyze, recirculate, and even store the phonemic features of words, but find difficulty in reconstructing the originally presented item from these features.

Regional cerebral blood flow correlates of auditory processing.

To study the regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) correlates of auditory processing, we performed rCBF measurements in young, normal right-handed volunteers engaged in listening tasks. Using the xenon Xe 133 inhalation technique, rCBF was measured in 11 regions in each hemisphere. Compared with a baseline condition, significant rCBF increases in the left posterior Sylvian regions were associated with both verbal phonologic processing and nonverbal acoustic processing. Verbal semantic processing was associated with unilateral increased rCBF in the posterior Sylvian region contralateral to the hand used for response signaling. Comparison of rCBF from homologous regions of the two hemispheres also confirmed a clear difference between the rhyme detection and meaning detection tasks, with the former strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere. Thus, changes in rCBF were related to the nature of the listening task.