Marie Stadler, Ph'D'

1
An Investigation of the Relations Among Rhyming,
Vocabulary, Letter Knowledge in Preschool-Aged
Children

• Marie Stadler, Ph.D. Abby Stellmacher
  University of Wisconsin Eau Claire
• Maggie Watson, Ph.D., Ashley Raddant, B.S., and
  Lisa Nysse, B. S. University of Wisconsin
  Stevens Point

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Introduction

• Emergent Literacy Skills include
• Print awareness
• Phonological awareness (PA)
• Letter knowledge
• Phonological awareness (PA) skills are strongly
  correlated with early word decoding.

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Importance of Phonological Awareness

• Measures of phonological awareness, particularly
  at the phoneme level, are powerful predictors of
  reading success.
• PA skills can predict early literacy more
  accurately than intelligence scores, vocabulary
  knowledge, and socioeconomic status.

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PA Development and Vocabulary

• PA skills may be dependent upon vocabulary
  development.
• At early stages of lexical development, words are
  processed holistically.
• But as vocabulary increases Lexical Restructuring
  occurs so words are processed and stored with
  more and more detail.
• That detailed information facilitates the growth
  of PA.

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Lexical Restructuring

• Dependent on similar sounding words in the
  lexicon (neighborhood density).
• Also dependent on number of familiar frequently
  accessed words in the lexicon.
• Thus, children with larger vocabularies have
  experiences making comparisons across similar
  sounding words, potentially facilitating the
  development of PA skills.
• However, the investigations of the relationship
  between childrens vocabulary skills and success
  with various PA tasks has produced mixed results.

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Alphabet Knowledge

• It has been suggested that some letter knowledge
  may trigger the development of PA.
• Learning letter names may help children
  appreciate the sound structure of words.
• There may be a bidirectional influence between
  letter knowledge and PA skills.

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Assessing Alphabet Knowledge

• Dodd and Carr (2003) showed a developmental
  progression of 4- and 5-year old children across
  three alphabet tasks, including letter
  recognition (easiest), identifying letter sounds,
  and writing letters (most difficult).
• However, other literacy or language measures were
  not obtained so correlations between alphabet
  knowledge and other literacy, as well as PA
  tasks, is not known.

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Method

• 38 children, ages 4- to 5- years
• Measures
• Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test 4
• Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test
• A sound identification task
• A letter identification task
• Expressive rhyming task
• Receptive rhyming task

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Description of Experimental Tasks

• Letter knowledge
• Adult pointed to letters and child provided the
  corresponding sound (sound identification).
• Adult produced the consonant sound and the child
  pointed to the corresponding letter (letter
  identification).
• Rhyming
• Expressive child provided a rhyme for each of 15
  words
• Receptive child chose the two words out of three
  choices that rhymed for 20 words.

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Experimental Tasks
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Research Questions Answers

• 1. Is receptive and/or expressive vocabulary
  related to receptive and or expressive rhyming?
  Yes
• 2. Is receptive and/or expressive rhyming related
  to sound and/or letter identification? No
• 3. Is sound and/or letter identification related
  to receptive and/or expressive vocabulary? Yes
  and No

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Means and (standard deviations)

• Children
• 26 boys mean age 57 months
• 12 girls mean age 55 ½ months
• PPVT-4 116 (13.20)
• EOWPVT 112 (14.91)
• Letter sounds identified 6.79/18 (4.62)
• Letters identified 8.24/18 (4.45)
• Expressive rhyming 8.05/15 (5.51)
• Receptive rhyming 13.87/20 (3.61)

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Correlations
plt 0.05, plt0.01
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Discussion

• These results support the assertion that
  vocabulary skills are correlated with PA.
• Rhyming skills were not strongly related to sound
  or letter identification.
• Only expressive vocabulary was related to sound
  and letter identification.

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Implications

• The results of this study highlight the
  importance of vocabulary development, especially
  expressively, for PA and possibly for alphabet
  knowledge.
• It appears that rhyming was not related to
  alphabet knowledge however, future research
  should investigate if phonemic awareness is
  related to alphabet knowledge.

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Select References