Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 82, 4757 (2002)

doi:10.1006/jecp.2002.2673

In the Beginning Was the Rhyme?

A Reflection on Hulme, Hatcher, Nation, Brown,
Adams, and Stuart (2002)
Usha Goswami
Institute of Child Health, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Phonological sensitivity at different grain sizes is a good predictor of reading acquisition
in all languages. However, prior to any explicit tuition in alphabetic knowledge, phonological sensitivity develops at the larger grain sizessyllables, onsets, and rimesin all languages so far studied. There are also developmental differences in the grain size of lexical
representations and reading strategies across orthographies. Phoneme-level skills develop
fastest in children acquiring orthographically consistent languages with a simple syllabic
(CV) structure, such as Finnish and Italian. For English, however, both large and small
units are important for the successful acquisition of literacy. 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)
Key Words: small units, large units, rimes, bodies, phonemes

In the area of reading development, there has been considerable debate about
the grain size of the orthographyphonology correspondences that are basic to the
acquisition of reading. This small versus large unit debate is the focus of the
paper by Hulme et al. (2002), who frame it in terms of the relative importance
of small versus large phonological units as predictors of individual differences in
reading skills (p. 3, my italics). Others have framed the debate in terms of
whether small units or large units are used first in reading acquisition (e.g.,
Duncan, Seymour, & Hill, 1997). Both frames may set up a misleading dichotomy. Adoption of a developmental perspective suggests that whether children use
small or large units in reading depends on the nature of the reading task, the type
of words being read, the methods of reading tuition that they are experiencing,
and the orthography under investigation (e.g., Brown & Deavers, 1999; Goswami
& East, 2000; Goswami, Gombert, & De Barrera, 1998; Perry & Ziegler, 2000).
Similarly, adoption of a developmental perspective suggests that whether small or
large units are the best predictors of individual differences in reading may depend
on the developmental level of the children being studied, the type of phonological awareness task being given to the child, whether extensive small unit teaching
characterizes early reading tuition, and the orthography under investigation.
I thank Ronald Peereman and Johannes Ziegler for their helpful comments and for making their
database analyses available for this paper.
Address correspondence and reprint requests to Usha Goswami, Behavioural and Brain Sciences
Unit, Institute of Child Health, University College London, 30 Guilford St., London WC1N 1EH, UK.
47
0022-0965/02 $35.00
2002 Elsevier Science (USA)
All rights reserved.

48

USHA GOSWAMI

The Learning Problem in Reading

Consider the learning problem facing a child encountering written English. The
child needs to learn how letters represent sounds. It is well documented that an
individual childs phonological sensitivity will help to determine whether the
child finds this learning task easy or difficult (e.g., Goswami & Bryant, 1990;
Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000; Stanovich, 1992). Individual differences in
phonological sensitivity can be measured in a variety of ways in children who can
already read. However, in prereaders individual differences in phonological sensitivity are only measurable in terms of large unitssyllables, onsets, and rimes.
The majority of prereaders do not develop phonemic awarenessat least, in
terms of those skills measured by most phonemic awareness tasks1until they
are being taught to read and spell. Once explicit tuition commences, the picture
changes very quickly. There is no doubt that for children of 5 and 6 years of age,
the experience of being taught to read and spell is an extremely effective way to
learn about phonemes. Moreover, the effects are rather rapid (Goswami &
Bryant, 1990, p. 148).
The most fine-grained level of segmental phonology usually available to the
truly beginning reader is that of the onset and the rime. This level of phonological
accessibility is not matched in the orthography. The most accessible unit in print is
that of the single letter, and indeed most teaching begins from the letter. In England,
all 5-year-olds are now taught lettersound correspondences as part of the National
Literacy Strategy (DfEE, 1998). They are also explicitly taught how to sound out
and blend, so that phonological recoding at the small unit level can be directly
applied to reading. The National Literacy Strategy does not recommend formally
teaching children about larger spelling sequences such as those representing rimes
until the second year of literacy instruction, when a small-unit foundation is already
in place. Beginning readers in England (5-year-olds) are taught first about the
sounds of letters in the initial position in CVC words, then about the sounds of letters in the final position, and then about the sounds of letters in the medial position.
Small-unit (graphemephoneme) correspondences are initially easy to teach,
because individual letters are explicitly represented in the written input.
At first sight it may seem peculiar that spelling correspondences for the large
units (rimes) that are phonologically easier to process are taught later than spelling
correspondences for the small units (phonemes) that are phonologically more difficult to process. However, the small units (phonemes) usually correspond to single letters, which are clearly separable in the orthography, and most words used in
1
Whether these skills are truly phonemic is questionable, of course. Most phonemic awareness
tasks are probably solved on the basis of orthography. Most children think that pitch has more
phonemes than rich and that foot has more phonemes than put (e.g., Ehri & Wilce, 1980; Tunmer &
Nesdale, 1985). Even most college students cannot make judgments about phonemes without the support of letters. Scholes (1998) reported that, whereas 86% of literate adults could delete the 4th sound
from stable (to leave stale), only 6% of the same adults could delete the 4th sound from faxed
(to leave fact). Only the former has a letter representing the phoneme to be deleted (the phonemes
are /b/ and /s/ respectively).

ROLE OF RHYME

49

the early reading curriculum have a 1:1 correspondence between letters and
sounds. Furthermore, many children learn the alphabet before formal teaching in
reading commences, and there is good evidence that this letter knowledge helps
them once they begin learning to read (e.g., Treiman, Tincoff, Rodriguez,
Mouzaki, & Francis, 1998). Hence pedagogically it may well be easier to begin
teaching children about letters, which many of them will already know about, and
then to proceed to instruction about larger units such as rimes (e.g., Allen, 1998;
Johnston, 1999; Moustafa & Maldonado-Colon, 1998; Wagstaff, 1997).
At the same time, however, work with skilled adult readers of English has
shown that these small units are highly inconsistent in pronunciation. English
graphemes can be pronounced in multiple ways and their pronunciation can be
spelled in multiple ways (e.g., Berndt, DAutrechy, & Reggia, 1994). For
English, it is the larger units, such as rimes, that have the advantage of being less
inconsistent in spellingsound correspondence (e.g., Treiman, Mullennix,
Bijeljac-Babic, & Richmond-Welty, 1995), and rime-level representations feature
strongly in the adult visual word recognition system (e.g., Ziegler & Perry, 1998).
This potential conflict between what is easy phonologically versus what is easy
orthographically has led Brown and Ellis (1994) to argue that beginning readers
are faced with the difficult task of establishing a mapping between incompatible
levels of representation in the orthographic and phonological domains. The
easy orthographic units are phonologically harder (and more inconsistent),
while the phonologically easy units may be orthographically harder (although
less inconsistent).
Children can certainly begin learning about large orthographic units from the
beginning of reading acquisition (Moustafa, 1995; Walton and Walton, 2002;
Walton, Bowden, Kurtz & Angus, 2001), and children who are explicitly taught
about large units rather than small units appear to make broadly equivalent
progress in reading to children taught about small units first (Walton, Walton, &
Felton, 2001). However, early explicit teaching about large units is not the norm
in English schools. The teaching of reading still begins with letters. Logically,
therefore, it is not surprising that when Hulme et al. (2002) studied a cohort of
English children who were already being taught to read by small unit methods,
phonemic awareness was a very strong predictor of reading. Phonemic awareness
depends on letters, and so does early reading tuition in England. If Hulme et al.
(2002) had studied prereaders, they would not have been able to use their phonemic awareness tasks. Like Bryant et al. (1989), they would have had to give 3and 4-year-olds phonological awareness tasks based on rhyme and alliteration.
They would only have been able to introduce phonological awareness tasks based
on phonemes at the age of around 5 years 6 months (as in Hulme et al., 2002, or
5 years 7 months, as in Bryant, Bradley, Maclean, & Crossland, 1989).
Why Rhyme?
If phonemic awareness is a product of reading, and is the best predictor of reading once children are being taught about letters, then we might ask why onset

50

USHA GOSWAMI

rime awareness should predict reading in English at all. As proposed a long time
ago (Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Stanovich, 1992), the answer lies partly in the
nature of phonological sensitivity in prereaders. Onsetrime awareness is a strong
predictor of reading when measured prior to literacy (e.g., Bradley & Bryant,
1983; Bryant et al., 1989) and usually continues to be a longitudinal predictor of
reading even in children who are readers (e.g., Hulme et al., 2002; see Goswami,
1999, for a full discussion). Onsetrime awareness also predicts reading in transparent languages such as Norwegian, Swedish, and German, even though its predictive power is usually weaker than that of phonemes (e.g., Hoien, Lundberg,
Stanovich, & Bjaalid, 1995; Lundberg, Olofsson, & Wall, 1980; Wimmer,
Landerl, & Schneider, 1994). Why might awareness of onsetrime predict reading even in transparent orthographies for which rimes are not useful orthographic units? One possibility lies in the origins of phonological awareness.
Metsala and Walley (1998) have proposed that one logical source of the development of phonological awareness skills in young children is vocabulary acquisition. Vocabulary grows at an exponential rate in early childhood and presumably
requires increasing neural organization in terms of factors such as phonological
similarity and semantic similarity. Thus phonological awareness may emerge as
a result of lexical restructuring processes that are an intrinsic part of language
acquisition (Metsala, 1999; Metsala & Walley, 1998; Walley, 1993). Metsala and
Walley propose that, when vocabulary size is small, there is no need to represent
words in a systematic or detailed manner, and so early word representations are
holistic, representing fairly global phonological characteristics (e.g., Ferguson,
1986; Jusczyk, 1986, 1993; Walley & Flege, 1999). As vocabulary grows, these
holistic representations are gradually restructured, so that smaller segments of
sound such as syllables are represented, and ultimately, phonemes. The core idea
is that, in the normal course of development, childrens phonological representations become increasingly segmental and distinctly specified in terms of phonetic features with age (see also Fowler, 1991).
According to Metsala and Walley (1998), lexical restructuring is relatively
word-specific, depending on factors such as overall vocabulary size, rate of
expansion, word frequency, familiarity, and the number of similar-sounding
words in the lexicon (phonological neighborhood density). The traditional linguistic similarity metric for defining a phonological neighborhood considers
neighbors to be words that differ by the addition, deletion, and substitution of a
single phoneme. According to this metric, rime neighbors such as what, onsetvowel or lead neighbors such as cough, and consonant neighbors such as kit, are
all considered to be equal phonological neighbors of a target word such as cot.
Metsala and Walley propose that words with many similar-sounding neighbors
(words in dense neighborhoods) should experience more pressure for phonemelevel restructuring than words with few similar-sounding neighbors (words in
sparse neighborhoods). There is already evidence that neighborhood density
affects the emergence of phonemic awareness (e.g., Metsala, 1999). However, as
full segmental representation of phonemes is largely dependent on reading

ROLE OF RHYME

51

tuition, full lexical restructuring at the phoneme level would not be an emergent
property of vocabulary growth per se. Rather, prior to literacy, the development
of segmental representation might depend critically on the nature of the words
that constitute densely versus sparsely populated phonological neighborhoods.
It is clear from connectionism that brains learn the statistical structure of any
input (e.g., Harm & Seidenberg, 1999). The argument here is that, for phonology,
this statistical structure might emphasize the rime, at least in European languages.
If phonological awareness emerges partly because of implicit processing of
interitem phonological similarity relations as vocabulary grows, then the characteristics of the phonological lexicon might in themselves contribute to the psychological salience of onsets and rimes in prereaders. In other words, lots of
phonological neighbors in the developing lexicon might be rhyming words.
Recently, my colleagues and I have analyzed all the monosyllabic words in
English, French, and German in terms of phonological neighborhood similarity
(see Goswami & De Cara, 2000; De Cara & Goswami, in press). The analyses for
English were carried out by Bruno De Cara, using the Luce and Pisoni (1998) lexical database of 20,000 English spoken forms. The analyses in French were carried out by Ronald Peereman using BRULEX, a comprehensive lexical database
for French spoken (and written) forms, and the analyses in German were carried
out by Jo Ziegler using CELEX, which has a comprehensive lexical database for
German spoken (and written) forms. The results are shown in Fig. 1.
As shown in the individual graphs, rime neighbors predominate in every language. Furthermore, rime neighbors are particularly prevalent in dense neighborhoods. In English, 58% of neighbors in dense phonological neighborhoods are
rime neighbors if rime neighbors are defined in terms of onset substitution (e.g.,
cot: pot, shot, slot, spot. . .). In contrast, only 41% of neighbors in sparse phonological neighborhoods are rime neighbors (e.g., mud: blood, thud). If these statistical patterns actually affect the development of phonological awareness, then
children should find it easier to decide that cot and pot rhyme than to decide
that thud and mud rhyme.

FIG. 1. Phonological neighborhood statistics for English, French and German.

RN, rime neighbors; CN, consonant neighbors; OVN, onset-vowel neighbors. English: De Cara &
Goswami, 3072 words. French: Peereman, 1766 words; German: Ziegler, 1422 words.

52

USHA GOSWAMI

Given that these are all highly familiar and early acquired words, it may seem
counterintuitive to propose that children will show better phonological awareness
of one rime compared to another. However, if such an effect could be demonstrated, it would help us to understand the basis of phonological awareness. In
essence, phonological awareness must be a consequence of how the brain
processes language. If implicit comparisons between similar-sounding words are
an important part of the emergence of phonological awareness, as suggested by
Metsala and Walleys (1998) lexical restructuring theory, then effects of neighborhood density should emerge in phonological awareness tasks, even when the
child is recognizing a salient phonological unit in very familiar words.
In ongoing work, we are using two different phonological awareness tasks to
test this hypothesis. One is the oddity task devised by Bradley and Bryant
(1983)2, in which children must select the odd word out on the basis of rime (e.g.,
pit, hit, got). In our experiments, 5- and 6-year-old children are asked to make
judgments about triples of words from dense neighborhoods, such as hot, lot,
wait, and triples of words from sparse neighborhoods, such as mud, thud,
good. The second is the samedifferent judgment task developed by Treiman and
Zukowski (1996). Here children must decide whether two spoken words share a
target sound or not. In our experiments, children are asked to make judgments
about pairs of words from dense neighborhoods, such as lick, sick and pairs of
words from sparse neighborhoods, such as soot, foot. Both tasks are intended
to be measures of epilinguistic processing (see Gombert, 1992). By using epilinguistic tasks (in which children must recognize shared sounds), we hope to tap
the level of phonological processing that might be expected to result primarily
from spoken vocabulary growth and associated changes in the familiarity of individual lexical items and interitem phonological similarity relations.
In our current studies, we are finding significant effects of neighborhood density on rime processing (e.g., De Cara & Goswami, in press). Children are significantly more accurate at making judgments about rhyme for words from dense
neighborhoods than for words from sparse neighborhoods. Overall, therefore,
neighborhood density effects in rime processing do emerge in simple phonological awareness tasks in English. We are currently conducting similar studies in
French and German via collaborations with Peereman, Leybaert, and Ziegler. If
it is accepted that vocabulary development is a critical factor in the emergence of
phonological awareness, then it is clear that the rime plays an organizing or
2

Although Hulme et al. (2002) state that the oddity task has undesirable psychometric properties
(p. 18), we have found the task to be a sensitive one in our own work. The oddity task is actually very
similar to classic speech perception tasks based on oddity, such as those used to measure awareness
of voicing and place. For example, the THRIFT battery uses 3-interval oddity tasks to measure
whether children can identify the odd stimulus from a set of sounds such as ata, ada, ata, differing
only in the voicing feature, or meem, moom, meem, differing only in vowel place (e.g., HnathChisolm, Liapply, & Boothroyd, 1998). Similarly, investigations of prereaders have reported that the
oddity task is one of the best measures to use in an early screen for later literacy difficulties (e.g.,
Majsterek & Ellenwood, 1995).

ROLE OF RHYME

53

anchoring role for English phonology due to its dominant role in neighborhood
similarity relations. If the rime turns out to have a similar role in other European
phonologies, this could explain the apparently universal sequence of phonological development (from syllable to onsetrime to phoneme) that can be demonstrated in cross-linguistic studies of phonological development (e.g., Goswami,
1997, for a review). Note also that the onsetrime measures taken, but not the
phoneme measures, were related to vocabulary development in the Hulme et al.
(2002) dataset, as would be predicted from the foregoing version of the lexical
restructuring hypothesis.
Rhyme and Theories of Reading Development
If the origins of phonological awareness lie in mounting neural pressure to
reorganize the phonological lexicon as more and more similar-sounding words
are acquired, then there is clearly an important role for rime awareness in phonological development. As we know that phonological awareness is important for
reading, accordingly rime awareness should play a role in reading development,
and indeed it does (e.g., Bradley & Bryant, 1983; see Goswami, 1999, for a recent
survey). Hulme et al. (2002) demonstrate that, as soon as children start learning
about letters, phoneme awareness (as measured by letter-based phonological
awareness tasks) becomes the stronger predictor of reading. This is not a critical
problem for what they term a large unit theory of reading development, as they
seem to assume. In fact, I know of no exclusively large unit theory of reading
development. Goswami and Bryant (1990) argued for at least three important
causal connections in reading, an early connection from rhyme to reading, a parallel and early-operating connection from phonemes to reading, and a third lateroperating connection from spelling to reading (see also Goswami, 1999). On the
basis of their results, Hulme et al. appear to suggest that awareness of large units
has no role to play in reading development in English: It is clear that an alphabetic script operates by mapping letters onto phonemes (p. 19). The ability to
learn to read effectively depends in turn upon creating mappings between
graphemic orthographic representations and phonemically organized phonological representations (p. 20). Connectionist models have demonstrated that for
learning to be efficient . . . the mappings need to operate at the level of
graphemes and phonemes (p. 1920).
As demonstrated at the beginning of this reflection, none of these statements
are accurate when considering the English orthography. Although English is
indeed an alphabetic script, it does not operate solely by mapping letters onto
phonemes (Berndt et al., 1994). In fact, it operates more consistently by mapping
letter patterns for rimes onto body units. The ability to learn to read effectively
does not depend only on creating mappings at the graphemephoneme level. In
fact, to be a really effective reader of English, it is necessary to supplement such
mappings with mappings for bigger spelling units such as orthographic rimes
(termed bodies in the adult literature). Good empirical evidence that both
English children (Goswami et al., 1997, 1998, Goswami, Ziegler, Dalton, &

54

USHA GOSWAMI

Schneider, 2001) and English adults (Ziegler, Van Orden, & Jacobs, 1997) develop orthographic representations that code rimes is easy to find. Finally, there are
rather few connectionist models of reading available at present, and only one of
these has purposely built onsetrime coding into its architecture (Zorzi,
Houghton, & Butterworth, 1998). Zorzi et al. showed that their model is actually
more efficient at learning the spelling system of English than models that rely on
graphemephoneme coding only. So rimes clearly play an important role in reading in English. The logical conclusion from Hulme et al.s demonstration is surely that large units play a developmentally complementary role in reading acquisition to that played by small units.
A Developmental Resolution?
The key to resolving this confusion may lie in adopting a developmental view
of the nature of the phonological representations that underlie the development of
literacy. Prior to learning about letters, these phonological representations code
relatively large units such as syllables, onsets, and rimes (although, of course,
many onsets in English are single phonemes). As demonstrated above, if the representational system is coding the statistical structure of the input (i.e., the structural similarity relations in English phonology), then rime units will play a key
role in phonological representation. Once orthographic learning commences, the
system undergoes massive and usually rapid reorganization. Orthographic learning highlights single letters, and early systematic tuition typically focuses on lettersound relations. Hence phonological representations are rapidly restructured
to represent phoneme-level information. This arises because of mappings from
spelling to sound, and not vice versa (as assumed by Hulme et al., p. 20).
However, the child soon discovers (or is taught) that the most consistent mappings from spelling to sound do not operate at the level of the single grapheme.
Rather, they operate at the level of the rime. Therefore, the child learning to read
English is forced to develop mappings at multiple levels, from graphemes to
phonemes, from bodies to rimes, and also from whole word phonology to letter
strings for words. Accordingly, children learning to read English develop
graphemephoneme correspondences more slowly than children learning to read
more transparent orthographies (see Goswami et al., 1998, 2001). The skilled
reading system in English does not operate on graphemes and phonemes alone.
Similarly, the developing reading system operates at multiple levels of psycholinguistic grain size (Goswami et al., 2001). This is why onsetrime awareness continues to predict reading development in English and why a model of
reading acquisition based on small units only cannot adequately capture the
processes involved in learning to read a nontransparent orthography.
REFERENCES
Allen, L. (1998). An integrated strategies approach: Making word identification instruction work for
beginning readers. The Reading Teacher, 52, 254268.
Berndt, R. S., DAutrechy, C. L., & Reggia, J. A. (1994). Functional pronunciation units in English
words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 20, 977993.

ROLE OF RHYME

55

Bradley, L. & Bryant, P.E. (1983). Categorising sounds and learning to read: A causal connection.
Nature, 310, 419421.
Brown, G. D. A., & Deavers, R. P. (1999). Units of analysis in nonword reading: Evidence from children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 73, 208242.
Brown, G. D. A., & Ellis, N. C. (1994). Issues in spelling research. In G. D. A. Brown & N. C. Ellis
(Eds.), Handbook of spelling: Theory, process and intervention (pp. 325). Chichester: Wiley.
Bryant, P.E., Bradley, L., Maclean, M., & Crossland, J. (1989). Nursery rhymes, phonological skills
and reading. Journal of Child Language, 16, 407428.
De Cara, B., & Goswami, U. (in press). Similarity relations among spoken words: The special status
of rimes in English. Behaviour Research Methods, Instruments & Computers.
Department for Education and Employment (1998). National Literacy Strategy. London: Author.
Duncan, L. G., Seymour, P. H. K., & Hill, S. (1997). How important are rhyme and analogy in beginning reading? Cognition, 63, 171208.
Ehri, L. C. & Wilce, L. S. (1980). The influence of orthography on readers conceptualisation of the
phonemic structure of words. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1, 371385.
Ferguson, C.A. (1986). Discovering sound units and constructing sound systems: Its childs play. In
J.S. Perkell & D.H. Klatt (Eds.), Invariance and variability in speech processes (pp. 3651).
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fowler, A. (1991). How early phonological development might set the stage for phoneme awareness.
In S. Brady and D. Shankweiler (Eds.), Phonological processes in literacy. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Gombert, J.E. (1992). Metalinguistic development. Hemel Hempstead, Herts: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Goswami, U. (1997). Learning to read in different orthographies: Phonological Skills, Orthographic
Representations and Dyslexia. In M. Snowling & C. Hulme (Eds.), Dyslexia: Biology,
Identification and Intervention, pp. 131152. London: Whurr Publishers.
Goswami, U. (1999). Causal connections in beginning reading: The importance of rhyme. Journal of
Research in Reading, 22, 217240.
Goswami, U., & Bryant, P.E. (1990). Phonological skills and learning to read. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Goswami, U., & De Cara, B. (2000). Lexical representations and development: The emergence of
rime processing. In A. Cutler, J. McQueen, & R. Zondervan (Eds.), Proceedings of the workshop
on spoken word access processes (pp. 99102), Max-Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics.
Goswami, U., & East, M. (2000). Rhyme and analogy in beginning reading: Conceptual and methodological issues. Applied Psycholinguistics, 21, 6393.
Goswami, U., Gombert, J., & De Barrera, F. (1998). Childrens orthographic representations and
linguistic transparency: Nonsense word reading in English, French and Spanish. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 19, 1952.
Goswami, U., Porpodas, C., & Wheelwright, S. (1997). Childrens orthographic representations in
English and Greek. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 12, 273292.
Goswami, U., Ziegler, J., Dalton, L., & Schneider, W. (2001). Pseudohomophone effects and phonological recoding procedures in reading development in English and German. Journal of Memory
& Language, 45, 648664.
Harm, M.W., & Seidenberg, M.S. (1999). Phonology, reading acquisition and dyslexia: Insights from
connectionist models. Psychological Review, 106, 491528.
Hnath-Chisolm, T. E., Laipply, E., & Boothroyd, A. (1998). Age-related changes on a childrens test
of sensory-level speech perception capacity. Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research,
41, 94106.
Hulme, C., Hatcher, P. J., Nation, K., Brown, A., Adams, J., & Stuart, G. (2002). Phoneme awareness
is a better predictor of early reading skill than onset-rime awareness. Journal of Experimental
Child Psychology, 82, 228.
Hoien, T., Lundberg, L., Stanovich, K.E., & Bjaalid, I.K. (1995). Components of phonological awareness. Reading & Writing, 7, 171188.
Johnston, F. (1999). The timing and teaching of word families. The Reading Teacher, 53, 6575.

56

USHA GOSWAMI

Jusczyk, P.W. (1986). Toward a model of the development of speech perception. In J.S. Perkell &
D.H. Klatt (Eds.), Invariance and variability in speech processes (pp. 133). Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Jusczyk, P.W. (1993). From general to language-specific capacities: The WRAPSA model of how
speech perception develops. Journal of Phonetics, 21, 328.
Lonigan, C.J., Burgess, S.R., & Anthony, J.L. (2000). Development of emergent literacy and early
reading skills in preschool children: Evidence from a latent-variable longitudinal study.
Developmental Psychology, 36, 596613.
Luce, P.A., & Pisoni, D.B. (1998). Recognising spoken words: The neighbourhood activation model.
Ear & Hearing, 19, 136.
Lundberg, I., Olofsson, A., & Wall, S. (1980). Reading and spelling skills in the first school years predicted from phonemic awareness skills in kindergarten. Scandanavian Journal of Psychology,
21, 159173.
Maclean, M., Bryant, P.E., & Bradley, L. (1987). Rhymes, nursery rhymes and reading in early childhood. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 33, 255282.
Majsterek, D.J., & Ellenwood, A.E. (1995). Phonological awareness and beginning reading:
Evaluation of a school-based training procedure. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 28, 449456.
Metsala, J.L. (1999). Young childrens phonological awareness and nonword repetition as a function
of vocabulary development. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 319.
Metsala, J.L., & Walley, A.C. (1998). Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of
lexical representations: Precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability. In J.L. Metsala
& L.C. Ehri (Eds.), Word recognition in beginning literacy (pp. 89120). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Moustafa, M. (1995). Childrens productive phonological recoding. Reading Research Quarterly, 30,
464475.
Moustafa, M., & Maldonado-Colon, E. (1998). Whole-to-parts phonics instruction: Building on what
children know to help them know more. The Reading Teacher, 52, 448458.
Perry, C., & Ziegler, J. C. (2000). Linguistic difficulties in childhood constrain adult reading. Memory
& Cognition, 28, 739745.
Scholes, R. J. (1998). The case against phonemic awareness. Journal of Research in Reading, 21,
177188.
Stanovich, K.E. (1992). Speculations on the causes and consequences of individual differences in
early reading acquisition. In P.B. Gough, L.C. Ehri, & R. Treiman (Eds.), Reading acquisition
(pp. 307342). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Treiman, R., Mullennix, J., Bijeljac-Babic, R., & Richmond-Welty, E. D. (1995). The special role of
rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography, Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 124, 107136.
Treiman, R., Tincoff, R., Rodriguez, K., Mouzaki, A., & Francis, D.J. (1998). The foundations of
literacy: Learning the sounds of letters. Child Development, 69, 15241540.
Treiman, R., & Zukowski, A. (1996). Childrens sensitivity to syllables, onsets, rimes and phonemes.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 61, 193215.
Tunmer, W. E. & Nesdale, A. R. (1985). Phonemic segmentation skill and beginning reading. Journal
of Educational Psychology, 77, 417527.
Wagstaff, J.M. (1997). Building practical knowledge of letter-sound correspondences: A beginners
Word Wall and beyond. The Reading Teacher, 51, 298304.
Walley, A. (1993). The role of vocabulary development in childrens spoken word recognition and segmentation ability. Developmental Review, 13, 286350.
Walley, A.C., & Flege, J.E. (1999). Effects of lexical status on native and non-native vowel perception: A developmental study. Journal of Phonetics, 27, 307332.
Walton, P., Bowden, M.E., Kurtz, S.L., & Angus, M. (2001). Evaluation of a rime-based reading program with Shuswap and Heiltsuk First Nations prereaders. Reading & Writing, 14, 229264.
Walton, P. D. & Walton, L. M. (2002). Beginning reading by teaching in rime analogy: Effects on
phonological skills, letter-sound knowledge, working memory and word-reading strategies.
Scientific Studies of Reading, 6 (1) 79115.

ROLE OF RHYME

57

Walton, P.D., Walton, L.M., & Felton, K. (2001). Teaching rime analogy or letter recoding reading
strategies to pre-readers: Effects on prereading skills and word reading. Journal of Educational
Psychology, 93, 160180.
Wimmer, H., Landerl, K., & Schneider, W. (1994). The role of rhyme awareness in learning to read a
regular orthography. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 12, 469484.
Ziegler, J. C., & Perry, C. (1998). No more problems in Colthearts neighborhood: resolving neighborhood conflicts in the lexical decision task. Cognition, 68 (2), 5362.
Ziegler, J. C., Van Orden, G. C., & Jacobs, A. M. (1997). Phonology can help or hurt the perception
of print. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 23, 845
860.
Zorzi, M., Houghton, G., & Butterworth, B. (1998). Two routes or one in reading aloud? A connectionist dual-process model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance, 24, 11311161.
Received November 16, 2000; revised February 8, 2001