Teaching children to recognise rhyme does not directly promote phonemic awareness

Background. Rhyming ability and phoneme awareness both predict aspects of reading development, with rhyming emerging earlier than phoneme awareness in most children. This study employed an experimental technique to elucidate the causal connections between these two aspects of phonological sensitivity. Aims. The purpose of this study was to examine whether teaching preschool children to detect rhyme promotes their ability to detect phoneme relations. Samples, Methods, Results. An experimental group of 23 children was successfully taught to rhyme, and compared to an untaught control group of 23 children in the ability to detect phonemes. Neither group showed any increase in phonemic awareness on an immediate or a delayed post-test. Conclusions. The results do not support the hypothesis that rhyme sensitivity is a causal precursor of phoneme sensitivity. We conclude that teaching children to rhyme remains an important preliteracy activity, but not because it directly promotes phonemic awareness.