ONSET RIME SENSITIVITY AND ORTHOGRAPHIC ANALOGIES IN NORMAL AND POOR READERS

This study was designed to determine whether there was a relationship between the ease with which children make use of orthographic analogie s and their progress in learning to read. The results of an experiment using a reading age match design showed that poor readers performed a s well as normal readers on orally presented measures of onset/rime se nsitivity, but less well on visually/orally presented rhyme tasks. The poor readers also performed less well than the normal readers on a ta sk that measured the children's ability to take advantage of analogica l units when reading lists of words; these reading lists contained gro ups of words that differed according to (1) whether the words containi ng 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 interventi on study demonstrated that poor readers who received instruction in th e use of orthographic analogies achieved higher reading accuracy score s on subsequent readings than did a matched group of poor readers who received standard remedial instruction in context cue usage.