RHYME PERCEPTION - GLOBAL OR ANALYTICAL

Preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade children who performed above chance level on a relatively easy rhyme-categorization task were given a second rhyme-categorization task that seems to require some analytical effort for successful performance. The children were also administered a version of the initial-consonant-deletion task. The results suggest that rhyme detection does not involve attention to segments. Nor does it necessarily involve precise identification of the segment shared by rhyming words. Whether rhyme perception involves some level of analysis may, to a large extent, depend on the subject’s reading level. The implications of these results for the controversy over the phonological operations presupposed by young children’s ability to detect rhyme are discussed. It is suggested that rhyme detection may be best described in terms of a sensitivity to some sort of global phonological similarity. © 1994 Academic Press, Inc.