title: The nature of rhyme processing in preliterate children.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Rhyme awareness is one of the earliest forms of phonological awareness to develop and is assessed in many developmental studies by means of a simple rhyme task. The influence of more demanding experimental paradigms on rhyme judgment performance is often neglected. Addressing this issue may also shed light on whether rhyme processing is more global or analytical in nature.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  The aim of the present study was to examine whether lexical status and global similarity relations influenced rhyme judgments in kindergarten children and if so, if there is an interaction between these two factors.
  
  
  METHODS
  Participants were 41 monolingual Dutch-speaking preliterate kindergartners (average age 6.0 years) who had not yet received any formal reading education.
  
  
  METHODS
  To examine the effects of lexical status and phonological similarity processing, the kindergartners were asked to make rhyme judgements on (pseudo) word targets that rhymed, phonologically overlapped or were unrelated to (pseudo) word primes.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Both a lexicality effect (pseudo-words were more difficult than words) and a global similarity effect (globally similar non-rhyming items were more difficult to reject than unrelated items) were observed. In addition, whereas in words the global similarity effect was only present in accuracy outcomes, in pseudo-words it was also observed in the response latencies. Furthermore, a large global similarity effect in pseudo-words correlated with a low score on short-term memory skills and grapheme knowledge.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Increasing task demands led to a more detailed assessment of rhyme processing skills. Current assessment paradigms should therefore be extended with more demanding conditions. In light of the views on rhyme processing, we propose that a combination of global and analytical strategies is used to make a correct rhyme judgment.
authors.affiliation: Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. b.wagensveld@bsi.ru.nl
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wagensveld
authors.forename: Petra
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: van Alphen
authors.forename: Eliane
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Segers
authors.forename: Ludo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Verhoeven
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D009426:Netherlands; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning