Should we spend time working on rhyme

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Should we spend time working on rhyme?

• Anne Hesketh, Evgenia Dima and Veronica Nelson
• The University of Manchester

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• What do we know about phonological awareness?
• important in early literacy
• as a group, children with speech disorder are
  poor at it
• not a unitary skill develops over several years

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• What DONT we know about PA?
• its role in speech development and change
• which subskills are possible / useful / essential
  elements of therapy

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• time
• mime
• crime
• rhyme
• lime
• climb
• dime

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• Is rhyme an important PA skill?
• Literacy
• Hulme and colleagues find that phoneme awareness
  is a better predictor of early reading than is
  onset-rime awareness
• Speech
• ??

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• results taken from research study
• Teaching phoneme awareness skills to
• pre-literate children with speech disorder
• funded by The Health Foundation

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• Participants
• 42 children with speech disorder age 40 46
• 34
• 8

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• Received either
• Phonological Language
• Awareness Stimulation
• N 22 N 20

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• Phonological awareness programme
• 20 sessions
• from syllable awareness to consonant addition and
  deletion
• 3 sessions specifically devoted to rhyme

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• Comments
• Three sessions was not enough time to make much
  difference in rhyme awareness.
• Those who had an awareness already could progress
  but those without did not learn quickly.
• Those children with an awareness of individual
  sounds and not much rhyme awareness tended to
  focus on initial sounds rather than rhyme.
• Awareness of rhyme did not seem to be necessary
  in order to progress with the rest of the
  programme.

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• Assessed on
• Pre-school and Primary Inventory of Phonological
  Awareness (PIPA) (Dodd et al. 2000)
• used 4 subtests including rhyme awareness
• example format

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• Rhyme awareness before the programme
• PA LS
• SS 9.5 9.0
• RS 4.6 4.1 (max 12)
• after programme
• SS 9.8 9.5
• RS 5.1 4.9

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rhyme awareness raw scores
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rhyme awareness showed only very limited change
after the PA programme
children in the LS group made just as much
progress
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• Rhyme awareness is quite an early stage of PA
• Onset isolation, blending, segmenting are
  supposedly later-acquired
• Is rhyme awareness a pre-requisite?

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What happens to phoneme isolation? example
format
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• Phoneme isolation before the programme
• PA LS
• SS 8.3 7.1
• RS 2.2 0.4 (max 12)
• after programme
• SS 11.5 7.2
• RS 8.2 1.6

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rhyme and phoneme awareness raw scores
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rhyme awareness doesnt seem to be a
pre-requisite for developing all other PA skills
some children remained very poor at rhyme
awareness but scored highly on phoneme isolation
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• Is rhyme different from other phonological
  awareness skills?
• there were other things that were hard to teach
  but they were more advanced skills we wouldnt
  predict at this age
• after intervention, alliteration, phoneme
  isolation and segmentation subtest scores were
  all significantly correlated with each other
  but none with rhyme

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• Is rhyme a necessary part of PA training?
• Maybe..
• Stackhouse (2002) rhyme is an inescapable part
  of phonological awareness training and
  phonological therapy
• Hulme et al (2002) suspect that you need to
  teach large unit awareness before small unit, BUT
  it needs verifying

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• Is rhyme a necessary part of PA training?
• But
• Gillon (2005) trained phoneme awareness in speech
  disordered children with PA delay at both rhyme
  and phoneme level. Rhyme wasnt targeted but
  other higher level phoneme skills were learned
• Our results suggest similar ability to progress
  in phoneme skills without good rhyme awareness

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• Is rhyme a necessary skill for speech change?
• Not yet known for sure
• Intuitively feel that phoneme level of awareness
  is more relevant to SLT and speech change
• Dont spend too much time on rhyme?