Current psychology letters

Behaviour, brain & cognition

10, Vol. 1, 2003 | 2003
Special Issue on Language Disorders and Reading
Acquisition

Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to

Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation
Elisabeth DEMONT

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cpl/380
ISSN: 1379-6100

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Centre PsyCLÉ

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 Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation 1

Developmental Dyslexia and

Sensitivity to Rhymes : A
Perspective for Remediation
Elisabeth DEMONT

Introduction
1 Developmental dyslexia is defined as the failure to acquire age appropriate reading skills
in spite of adequate educational resources in otherwise normally developing children.
The field of dyslexia research is dominated by the phonological deficit explanation which
Stanovich (1994) summarized quite succinctly: “Most cases of reading disability arise
beacause of difficulties in the process of word recognition. These difficulties are, in turn,
due to deficiencies in processes of phonological coding whereby letter patterns are
transformed into phonological codes. The precursor to the phonological coding difficulty
appears to be a deficit in segmental language skills sometimes termed phonological
awareness or phonological sensitivity” (p. 585).
2 Phonological awareness deficits in dyslexia have been documented by many researchers
in many languages (Goswami, 2000 for a succinct review). The term phonological
awareness covers various phonological segments (syllable, onset-rime, phoneme) and
several manipulations. The phoneme level is of critical importance for understanding the
alphabetic principle (see Snowling, 2000 for a recent review of the field). Indeed, learning
to read an alphabetic orthography requires the child to set up a system of mappings
between the letter strings of printed words and the phonemic sequences that comprise
spoken words. So, acquiring the ability to bring the phonemes to consciousness is a
critical step in learning to read. A strong link has been drawn between reading difficulties
and deficits in phonological skills. One hypothesis that has been put forward to explain
the reading difficulties of dyslexic children is that they come to the task of learning to
read with poorly specified phonological representations (e.g. Colé & Sprenger-Charolles,
1999; Curtin et al., 2001; Joanisse et al., 2000; Mayringer & Wimmer, 2000; Metsala, 1999;
Pennington et al., 2001). There is evidence that difficulties with phonemic awareness
predict subsequent reading problems. However, from the perspective of reading

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 Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation 2

acquisition, it has been argue that literacy experience is crucial for the development of
phonological awareness and there is some evidence that exposure to alphabetic literacy
may affect phonological processing more generally. Thus, the representation of
phoneme-level information is thought to develop with the acquisition of literacy, because
the feedback provided by graphemic information helps the child to represent segmental
information at the phonemic level. It follows that the phonological deficits that are
marked among dyslexics may be a consequence as much as a cause of their failure to
learn to read.
3 In summary, a strong case has been made for a link between phonological awareness and
alphabetic literacy acquisition (for an extensive review, see Ehri et al., 2000; Gombert,
1992). On the other hand, studies of the development of phonological skills show that
young children do not experience any difficulty in manipulating phonological units larger
than phonemes. While preliterate readers show poor awareness of phonemes prior to
being taught to read, they can show a certain representation of phonological segments
corresponding to syllables or rimes. Moreover, children’s global sensitivity to these larger
units is a predictor of children’s success in learning to read (e.g. Bryant et al., 1990;
Duncan et al., 1997).
4 It is nonetheless regrettable that reading disabilities and phonological awareness have
usually been treated in somewhat global terms. The present study aims to determine
whether the cause of dyslexia is general impairment at the level of phonological
representations whatever the phonological units or is an exclusive impairment at the
phonemic level. The primary purpose of this article is to compare the phonological
awareness of dyslexics with that of normally achieving readers using a traditional word
reading level match in order to determine whether dyslexics differ from normal readers
in their pattern of relative strenghts and weakness in the cognitive processes thought to
underlie reading.
MethodParticipants
5 19 dyslexic children were recruited from a special school for dyslexics. At the time of first
participation, they were about 10;3 years old and had started their 1st year in this special
school (Table 1). They had no speech or articulatory problems or neurological deficits and
presented with more than three years’ delay in reading fluency assessed with Lefavrais’s
Alouette test (1967). At the first test point, they were matched for reading level with 25
average first-grade readers (mean age 6 years 6 months). Non-verbal intelligence was
assessed with the Raven’s Progressive Matrices (1981) which located the two groups at
the 90th centile. All were predominately from middle-class homes.
6 All children were tested on two occasions separated by 8 months with a battery of
phonological awareness and reading abilities tasks.
Phonological awareness tasks
7 The phonological awareness tasks required the child to identify phonological segments of
different sizes within individual words. Each task consisted of two practice items with
corrective feedback and eight experimental items without further feedback.
Phonological oddity tasks
8 These tasks required the child to classify spoken words on the basis of subsyllabic units,
rhyme or onset. The child had to select from four monosyllabic words one word which
lacked a sound in common with the other three. In the rhyme oddity task, three words
shared a rhyme unit not present in the fourth (e.g. noire-poire-robe-foire); in the onset

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 Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation 3

oddity task, three words shared a common onset (e.g. clou-bruit-clan-clé). In a third set, a
final oddity task, three words shared a word-final phoneme not present in the fourth (e.g.
tâche-bûche-riche-pour). The order of the odd word was systematically varied so that it
occurred equally often in each position. Scoring was based upon the number of correct
items.
Phoneme deletion tasks
9 The tasks consisted of eight items from which the initial phoneme was to be deleted (e.g. g
ris), eight from which the middle phoneme was to be deleted (e.g. train) and finally eight
items from which the final phoneme was to be deleted (e.g. film). The child had to work
out what a word would be like without its initial, middle or final phoneme. Scoring was
based upon the number of correct responses.
Reading measuresWord reading
10 The child was required to read one 16-words list in which eight words were regular (e.g.
porte) and eight were irregular (e.g. femme). Scoring was based upon the total number of
regular and irregular words correctly identified.
Non-word reading
11 Non-word reading is a good measure of phonological recoding skill, since sublexical level
spelling-to-sound correspondences must be invoked. The child was required to read one
16-non-words list in which eight non-words were matched in orthography with regular
words (analogous non-words) and eight were not matched (non-analogous non-words, e.g.
loumi). Analogous non-words (see Goswami et al., 1998; Sprenger-Charolles et al., 1998)
were formed by modifying the initial consonant letter of regular words (e.g. table vs
mable). Thus the analogous non-words have the same rhyme as the words from which
they are derived. Scoring was based upon the total number of analogous-non-words and
non analogous-non-words correctly identified.
Statistical analysis
12 Dyslexic and beginning reader performances were compared for each cognitive measure
separately using ANCOVA with non-verbal intelligence as the covariate and session as the
repeated-measures variable.
Results
13 Means and standard deviations on phonological and reading measures are displayed in
Table 1.

Table 1

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 Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation 4

Means and standard deviations for each of the phonological and reading measures (out of 8)

Phonological awarenessPhonological oddity tasks

14 The comparisons of mean scores for each test separately on analysis of variance showed a
Group by Session interaction for the onset oddity test [F(1,41)=3.90; p<.05] and for the
final oddity test [F(1,41)=6.71; p<.01] but no significant interaction for the rhyme oddity
test [p>.10]. Post-hoc inspection (Newman Keuls) of these significant interactions revealed
that, although the dyslexics performed better than the younger readers in the first
session, there was no group effect in the second session. This was due to the fact that the
beginning readers’ performances increased significantly between the two sessions,
whereas those of dyslexics did not.
Phoneme deletion tasks
15 Again, session interacted significantly with group in the comparison for the initial
phoneme deletion task [F(1,41)=4.5, p<.05] and for the medial phoneme deletion task [F
(1,41)=4.02, p<.05] reflecting the fact that the performances of the dyslexics did not
improve between the two sessions, while those of the reading age controls did. So at the
second test point, the dyslexic children exhibited a lower performance on the phonemic
awareness tasks than the younger beginner readers, even though they both started with a
similar performance at the first session.
Reading abilitiesReading age
16 The Group by Session interaction [F(1,41)=8.64; p<.01] is striking in showing that the
reading-age controls show the expected increase in reading age in the eight months
between the two sessions, whereas the improvement in the dyslexics' reading is only
three months.
Word reading

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 Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation 5

17 The three-way interaction between Group, Word, Session is significant [F(1,41)=4.46; p

<.05]. This reflects the fact that, whereas the dyslexics performed at the same level than
the reading age controls on regular word reading in the two sessions, a different pattern
was observed for irregular word reading. Indeed, although the dyslexics performed better
on irregular words (2.68 out of 8) than the first-grade children (1.20) in the first session,
there was no difference between the groups in the second session (respectively, 5.08 and
4.21). This reflected the fact that the beginning readers' performances on irregular words
improved more than those of the dyslexics.
Non-word reading
18 Whatever the session, the dyslexics were found to read non-words with lower accuracy
than the beginning readers [F(1,41)=5.76; p<.05]. On the other hand, the three-way
interaction between Group, Nonword, Session [F(1,41)=4.60; p<.05] is striking in showing
that only the beginning readers’ performance improved significantly (rising from 5.48 to
6.48 out of 8), whereas the dyslexics did not improve (4.53 in the first session vs 4.84 in
the second session). Finally, the normal readers appeared to read more analogous non-
words only in the first session, whereas the dyslexic children appeared to significantly
better at reading the analogous non-words than the non-analogous non-words in the two
sessions. So because the dyslexics exhibited rather accurate analogous non-word reading,
they seem to use an analogy strategy for reading more accurately.
Discussion
19 At the first test point of this study, the dyslexics were matched for reading level with
younger beginning readers and were studied at two points using various phonological
and reading tasks. The longitudinal observation of the same children was a key feature of
our study and allowed us to determine the development of phonological awareness skills
in dyslexic children in comparison with beginning readers. Several results may be
underlined.
20 Firstly, both groups of children seem to be using a decoding strategy in reading as a
regularity effect is apparent in their word reading. Nevertheless, a nonword reading
deficit is uncovered amongst the dyslexics suggesting that their use of a decoding
strategy is less efficient than younger normally achieving children matched on reading
age. The low efficiency with which the dyslexic children read non-words is consistent
with the phonological deficit explanation of dyslexia which affects learning to read via
impaired acquisition of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. It was emphasized that a
non-word cannot be read through a direct match with a representation previously stored
in lexical memory. So for dyslexic children, it can be ruled out that the non-word reading
difficulty is due to insufficient knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences even
after four years of tuition and intensive remediation. This leads to difficulties in the
reliable recognition of non-words or new words.
21 Secondly, when we started testing, the dyslexic children performed at the same level or
even greater level of accuracy than the reading age controls on phonological tasks. So, we
postulate that their performance on these tasks reflects the profits of special education.
On the other hand, their superiority on phonological oddity tasks seems to us to be due to
the high mnesic component of these tasks that could penalize the youngsters. Afterwards,
the longitudinal observation showed that the beginning readers’ performances increased
significantly between the two sessions, whereas those of the dyslexics did not. For the
phoneme tasks and for the two phoneme versions of the oddity tasks (onset and final),
the dyslexic children do not improve in the second session despite intensive remediation

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 Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation 6

at this level. So, the phonological awareness is hardly developing at all in the dyslexic
children, even though it does develop in the controls. Clearly the specialised remediation
is helping the dyslexic children to some extent at Session 1 but this disappears at Session
2 when the normally developing children have caught up. Hence the dyslexics are
showing specifically phonemic deficits in terms of the developmental design. In other
words, the persistence of the phonemic deficit in spite of the remediation suggests that
difficulties with phonemic representation appeared to be at the core of reading
disabilities.
22 Thirdly, it was found that the dyslexics had little or no difficulties with the rhyme
identification and were impaired on the phonemic tasks (the phoneme deletion tasks and
the two phoneme versions of the oddity task). This finding indicates that dyslexics
experience long-lasting difficulties with the highest level of abstraction, the
identification and manipulation of phonemes but no difficulties with the larger units, like
rhymes, which can be considered to be salient units (Goswami & Bryant, 1990). The
present finding is consistent with the hypothesis that the reading difficulties of dyslexics
are being caused by a current deficit in accessing the phonemic level of speech. So
dyslexics seem not to acquire complete facility at the phonemic level, despite the fact
that remediation is usually directed at this level. It is also necessary to distinguish
between processes which have a different cognitive status depending on whether or not
they are consciously accessible. Performances achieved in the rhyme detection task
might reflect epiphonological processing (Gombert, 1992), i.e. an “implicit phonological
awareness” according to Seymour et al. (1999). Indeed rhyming ability need not imply
conscious knowledge since the children may to make judgements on the overall
phonological similarity between words (Duncan et al., 1997). In contrast, the
performances achieved in the two phoneme versions of oddity tasks and the phoneme
tasks might reflect metaphonological processing or an explicit awareness. In consequence
to this view, we postulate that dyslexics -like pre-literate children- may develop an
implicit awareness of rhyme. Since tuition and remediation in sound-to-symbol
correspondences has not been successful for dyslexics, interventions are required to
facilitate progress. So an educational implication of our hypothesis is that dyslexics may
be better able to benefit from instruction about larger units like rhymes. This might
induce the dyslexics to use their implicit knowledge in their attempts at reading and to
develop an orthographic analogy strategy for reading new words.
23 Finally, from the perspective of reading acquisition, phonological recoding functions as a
self-teaching mechanism (Share, 1995) enabling the learner to acquire the detailed
orthographic representations necessary for rapid and visual word recognition. In
particular, orthographic development may normally be a process which moves forward
from mastery of small units towards large units. In dyslexia this development seems not
to occur in a normal way. Indeed, our results emphasized that, while dyslexics showed
deficits on phonemic awareness compared with children matched on reading level, their
word reading abilities -but not their non-word reading- nonetheless improved between
the two sessions. This finding seems to provide an evidence for an improvment in their
orthographic knowledge. In other words, dyslexics are able to learn to recognize whole
words but have difficulty in adopting a small unit phonemic approach. This leads us to
wonder about the nature of orthographic strategy development. At present, we postulate
that dyslexics’ rhyme awareness underpins orthographic development. In particular,
dyslexics might make use of their rhyme sensitivity in order to group words into rhyming

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 Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation 7

families sharing the same orthographic pattern and to develop an analogy strategy to
read new words. In this prospect, the dyslexics’ superiority on analogous non-words
reading supports our hypothesis that dyslexics could benefit from tuition in an
orthographic analogy strategy for reading new words. If so, our interpretation disagrees
with Sprenger-Charolles & al.’s (1998) conclusion. Indeed, these authors attribute the
advantage for the analogous non-words to the oral lexicon rather than to the
orthographic one.
24 So, one interesting question is whether a relationship exists between sensitivity to
rhymes and the much later emphasis on this structure in orthographic development.
Further research, involving training studies, is required to clarify this hypothesis.
Evidence for this relationship might be provided by training children on manipulation of
rhymes. We postulate that the trained children could increase their rhyming skills and
their capacity to group words into rhyming families. In consequence, they might obtain
better performances on reading tasks. If this were to be the case, it might then be open to
teachers to adapt some of the techniques for investigation of large unit processing in
order to gain an understanding of these linguistic units.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bryant, P.E., McLean, M., Bradley, L.L. & Crossland, J. (1990). Rhyme, alliteration, phoneme
detection and learning to read. Developmental Psychology, 26, 429-438.

Colé, P. & Sprenger-Charolles, L. (1999). Traitement syllabique au cours de la reconnaissance de

mots écrits chez des enfants dyslexiques, lecteurs en retard et normo-lecteurs de 11 ans. Revue de
Neuropsychologie, 9, 323-360.

Curtin, S., Manis, F. & Seidenberg, M.S. (2001). Parallels between the reading and spelling deficits
of two subgroups of develomental dyslexics. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 14,
515-547.

Duncan, L.G., Seymour, P. & Hill, S. (1997). How important are rhyme and analogy in beginning
reading? Cognition, 63, 171-208.

Ehri, L., Nunes, S.R., Willows, D.M., Schuster, B., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z. & Shanahan, T. (2000).
Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read: evidence from the National
reading panel’s meta-analysis. Reading Researh Quartely, 36, 250-287.

Gombert, J.E. (1992). Metalinguistic Development. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Goswami, U. (2000). Phonological representations, reading developement and dyslexia: towards a

cross-linguistic theoretical framework. Dyslexia, 6, 133-151.

Goswami, U. & Bryant, P. (1990). Phonological skills and learning to read. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum.

Goswami, U., Gombert, J.E. & Fraca de Barrera, L. (1998). Children’s orthographic representations
and linguistic transparency: nonsense word reading in English, French and Spanish. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 19, 19-52.

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 Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation 8

Hatcher, P.J. & Hulme, C. (1999). Phonemes, rhymes, and intelligence as predictors of children’s
responsiveness to remedial reading instruction: Evidence from a longitudinal intervention study.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 72, 130-153.

Joanisse, M.F., Manis, F.R., Keating, P. & Seidenberg, M.S. (2000). Language deficits in dyslexic
children: speech perception, phonology and morphology. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,
77, 30-60.

Lefavrais, P. (1967). L’Alouette, test d’analyse de la lecture et de la dyslexie. Paris: Les Editions du
Centre de Psychologie Appliquée.

Mayringer, H. & Wimmer, H. (2000). Pseudoname learning by German-speaking children with

dyslexia: Evidence for a phonological learning deficit. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 75,
116-133.

Metsala, J.L. (1999). The development of phonemic awareness in reading-disabled children.

Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 149-158.

Pennington, B., Cardoso-Martins, C., Green, P.A. & Lefly, D.L. (2001). Comparing the phonological
and double deficit hypotheses for developmental dyslexia. Reading and Writing: an Interdisciplinary
Journal, 14, 707-755.

Raven, J.C. (1981). Progressives Matrices Couleur. Issy-les-Moulineaux: Editions Scientifiques et

Psychotechniques.

Seymour, P.H. & Duncan, L.G. (1999). Small versus large unit theorie of reading acquisition,
Dyslexia, 3, 125-134.

Share, D.L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: sine qua non of reading acquisition,
Cognition, 55, 151-218.

Snowling, M.J. (2000). Dyslexia. Oxford: Blackweel Publishers.

Sprenger-Charolles, L., Siegel, L. & Bonnet, P. (1998). Reading and spelling acquisition in French:
The role of phonological mediation and orthographic factors. Journal of Experimental Child
Psychology, 134-165.

Stanovich, K.E. (1994). Annotation: Does dyslexia exist? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry,
55, 579-595.

ABSTRACTS
We designed this study as a comparison of the language processes of word recognition skills in
dyslexics and beginning readers matched on reading level at two time points. Results from the
battery of phonological processing tasks support the findings of previous studies that a
phonemic deficit is the dominant cognitive deficit of dyslexics. Another interesting result shows
that while the beginners’ performances in all tasks increases between the two sessions, this is not
the case for dyslexics. At the second test point, they exhibit a lower performance than the
younger beginning readers. However, they show an improvment in orthographic knowledge. We
postulate that dyslexics’ rhyme awareness might underpin orthographic development. If this
were the case, it might then be open to teachers to adapt some of the techniques for
investigation of large unit processing in order to gain an understanding of the linguistic units.

L'objectif de l'étude consistait à comparer à deux reprises les habiletés phonologiques et la

reconnaissance de mots d’enfants dyslexiques appariés initialement sur l'âge lexique à des

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 Developmental Dyslexia and Sensitivity to Rhymes : A Perspective for Remediation 9

enfants apprentis-lecteurs. Les résultats recueillis aux différentes épreuves phonologiques sont
congruents avec les conclusions d'études antérieures soulignant que le déficit phonémique est le
déficit cognitif majeur des enfants dyslexiques. Un autre résultat intéressant met en évidence
que les performances des enfants dyslexiques n'augmentent pas d'une session à l'autre,
contrairement à ce qui est observé pour les apprentis-lecteurs. Ils obtiennent ainsi lors de la
deuxième session des performances inférieures à celles des normo-lecteurs. Cependant, leurs
résultats attestent du développement de leurs connaissances orthographiques. Nous postulons
ainsi que les enfants dyslexiques s'appuieraient sur leur sensibilité aux rimes pour développer
leurs représentations orthographiques. Si tel est le cas, il serait envisageable d'adapter des
techniques de remédiation au niveau des unités plus larges en vue d'améliorer leur
compréhension des différentes unités linguistiques.

INDEX
Keywords: phonological awareness, developmental dyslexia, reading disabilites, sensitivity to
rhymes

AUTHOR
ELISABETH DEMONT

Université Louis Pasteur, 12 rue Goethe, F-67000 Strasbourg-France

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