LEARNING TO PRONOUNCE WORDS - THE LIMITATIONS OF ANALOGIES

AN EXPERIMENT was designed to examine the degree to which teaching beginning readers to use various types of analogies helps them to pronounce new words and nonwords. Thirty-nine first graders were taught to read a list of words by pointing out to them how these words shared the same rime, initial consonant + vowel (CV), or vowel as a set of words they already knew. The children in the rime group learned the new words fastest but remembered fewer of these words than the children in the other two groups. The children in the vowel group performed best on a generalization test consisting of nonwords. The rime- and CV-trained children did not transfer their analogy strategies to the generalization test. Our results suggest that, although beginning readers can use analogies, they rely to a large extent on correspondences between individual phonemes and graphemes to decode new words.