Orthographic Effects in Auditory Rhyme Decisions in Children

AbstractAn experiment is reported that examined the relationship between phonology and orthography in the auditory rhyme decision task in children. It is investigated how the spelling of a word affects rhyme decisions, which can be done only on the basis of phonological information. Young children revealed the orthographic facilitation and inhibition effects even when subsequent spelling tests showed that for some words the children only had an implicit knowledge about the words’ spellings and were not yet able to produce explicitly their correct spelling. Older children have the same automatic processes as adults: they activate orthographic information and are faster to decide that two spoken words rhyme when these are spelled similarly than dissimilarly, and are slower to decide that two words do not rhyme if these are spelled similarly than dissimilarly