Further Evidence That Orthographic Rime Usage in Nonword Reading Increases with Word-Level Reading Proficiency

This research investigated children's use of orthographic rime correspondences in nonword reading in association with word-level reading skills. Experiment 1 demonstrated an increase in the use of orthographic rime correspondences in two independent nonword reading tasks from second to fourth grade. There was no further increase from fourth to sixth grade. In an ambiguous nonword reading task, where grapheme-phoneme and orthographic rime correspondences yielded conflicting pronunciations, the use of orthographic rime correspondences varied with the orthographic onset employed. The use of orthographic rime correspondences in reading ambiguous nonwords was more strongly associated with word-level reading skills than was the use of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Experiment 2 replicated the main findings of Experiment 1 concerning the association between word-level reading skills and the use of orthographic rime correspondences in nonword reading within second-grade children. These findings suggest that the use of orthographic rime correspondences in the phonological recoding process increases with word-level reading proficiency.