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.