|
Description
Poetic rhyme is one source of evidence for a level of structure within the syllable called the onset and the rime (Fudge, 1987; MacKay, 1972). The proposal is that the syllable branches into an onset which consists of the initial consonant or consonant cluster, and a rime which contains the vowel and any following consonants. In the English language, at least, poetic devices based on sound patterns reflect this division. Leech (1969) noted that rhyme (e.g. send-lend) and alliteration (e.g. great-grow) are more important than the other poetic forms of sound correspondence associated with monosyllabic words, namely, assonance (e.g. send-bell), consonance (e.g. send-hand), 'reverse rhyme' (e.g. send-sell) and 'pararhyme' (e.g. send-sound). This, in conjunction with arguments from the field of linguistics (see Fudge, 1987), has contributed to the popularity of onset-rime syllable structure in psycholinguistic theory where it is favoured over alternative schemes that combine onset, peak and coda elements in a linear manner (Clements & Keyser, 1983), or in other hierarchical formations such as body-coda structure (Iverson & Wheeler, 1989) or shell structure (Togeby, 1951).
Experimental studies which demonstrate that rhyme is salient from an early age provide further support for an onset-rime division within the syllable. The developmental literature documents preschool children's nursery rhyme knowledge (MacLean, Bryant, & Bradley, 1987), their spontaneous production of rhyming sounds during language acquisition (Chukovsky, 1963; Inkelas, 2003; Slobin, 1978) and their ability to compose rhyming poems on request (Dowker, 1989; Dowker, Krasowicz, Pinto, Roazzi, & Smith, 1998). Early sensitivity to rhyme has also been established in experiments using a variety of more formal rhyming tasks: forced-choice paradigms (Lenel & Cantor, 1981); oddity tasks (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Duncan, Seymour, & Hill, 1997; MacLean et al., 1987); same-different matching (Stuart & Coltheart, 1988); and production tasks (Duncan & Seymour, 2000; Seymour & Evans, 1994; Stuart & Coltheart, 1988). Rhyming skills show improvement during the preschool period (MacLean et al., 1987) and, prior to school entry, accuracy is high in oddity and matching tasks (Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Stuart & Coltheart, 1988). Preschool rhyming ability has also been found to be superior to onset-based alliteration skill in production tasks (Duncan & Seymour, 2000; Seymour & Evans, 1994).
Reports of a correlation between early rhyming skill and later reading ability (Bradley & Bryant, 1985; Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland, 1990; MacLean et al., 1987) led to the evolution of a theory which links awareness of onset and rime units to reading acquisition. Central to the theory was an existing proposal that children will use the level of phonological structure that they are sensitive to in their early attempts to read (Rozin & Gleitman, 1977; Treiman, 1987). The theory also incorporates an analogical reading mechanism based on rhyme which was described by Goswami (1986, 1988). The sequence begins when children form categories of words in their spoken vocabulary which rhyme. As they start to encounter these words in print, children realize that the words share spelling patterns which represent the common sound and this insight enables them to make inferences about the pronunciation of new words (Goswami, 1993; Goswami & Bryant, 1990).
Although the precise timing of rime analogy use is the subject of an ongoing debate (Bowey & Hansen, 1994; Bowey & Underwood, 1996; Brown & Deavers, 1999; Duncan et al., 1997, 2000; Ehri & Robbins, 1992; Goswami, 1999; Savage & Stuart, 1998), there is a broad consensus that rime units play a role in reading development. For example, rime frequency effects are routinely found in children's word and nonword naming (Bowey & Underwood, 1996; Coltheart & Leahy, 1992; Duncan et al., 2000; Laxon, Masterson, & Coltheart, 1991; Leslie & Calhoon, 1995; Treiman, Goswami, & Bruck, 1990), and have also been observed in adult reading (Patterson & Morton, 1985; Treiman et al., 1990).
A striking feature of existing research on sensitivity to rime units is a reliance on the use of monosyllabic stimuli. Our interest is in exploring how well the link between rhyme and reading generalizes from monosyllabic to multisyllabic words. Goswami and Bryant's (1990) original proposal was built on the concordance between rhyme and the rime unit in monosyllabic words (e.g. beak-peak). In poetry, this 'masculine' type of rhyme is distinguished from the 'feminine' rhyme (e.g. rocket-pocket) which occurs in disyllabic words (Leech, 1969). This suggests that multisyllabic rhyme can span syllables and raises interesting questions about the internal structure of multisyllabic words.
Treiman (1992) expresses the standard 'hierarchical' model in which there is a division into individual syllables, each containing an onset and a rime (see Figure 1(a)). However, a feminine rhyme such as rocket-pocket seems to imply an alternative division into an onset and a 'remainder'. This point was made by Davis (1989) on the basis of an analysis of speech errors. He argued that monosyllabic spoonerisms which appear to demonstrate the cohesiveness of the rime unit (e.g. if the fap kits for if the cap fits) are more plausibly interpreted as evidence for an onset plus remainder split if multisyllabic examples are also considered (e.g. heft lemisphere for left hemisphere).
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Berg (1989) has offered an alternative description which accommodates both onset-remainder and onset-rime structure. Berg introduces a higher order unit corresponding to the remainder which he calls the 'superrime'. According to his account, the hierarchical structure of a disyllable is headed by an onset and a superrime (see Figure 1(b)). The superrime itself can be split into a rime and a syllable which retains its internal onset-rime structure. Experimental evidence provided by Treiman, Fowler, Gross, Berch, and Weatherston (1995) is more compatible with this view than with the single onset-remainder split proposed by Davis (1989). Adult performance in a sound substitution game was sensitive to onset-rime structure within the stressed medial syllable of trisyllables and in the final syllable of disyllables.
Treiman, Fowler et al. (1995) also observed an interaction between stress pattern and syllable structure which indicated that the onsets of stressed syllables were particularly salient. Related evidence is available from poetry where the influence of stress pattern is apparent in the general definition of rhyme presented by Leech (1969). He states that rhyming words of any size share everything after the onset of the stressed syllable and gives the polysyllabic examples 'civility-mobility' and 'stationary-inflationary' as illustrations. (1) Clearly, an initial onset-plus-remainder split need not be implied by all multisyllabic rhymes. Berg (1989) reinforces this point by suggesting that unstressed initial syllables may be treated as a 'phonological appendix' to an onset-rime (disyllable) or onset-superrime (polysyllable) division (see Figure 2).
These linguistic arguments suggest that the relationship between rhyme and reading may be much less straightforward for disyllables than it is for monosyllables. The difficulty is to determine what constitutes an awareness of rhyme in the context of multisyllables. To date, rather few empirical studies of this issue have been reported. Gipstein, Brady, and Fowler (2000) tested children's phonological sensitivity in matching disyllabic words and reported greater accuracy for word-pairs such as 'mountain-fountain' and 'station-lotion' than for pairs such as 'melon-wagon'. These results suggest that superrime or syllabic units may be more salient than rime units in disyllabic words. However, the matching task is known to be sensitive to the phonemic length of shared units and it is very possible that performance is determined by global similarity rather than linguistic structure (Content, 1985; Gipstein et al., 2000; Morais, 1991; Treiman & Zukowski, 1996). For this reason, another task, the rhyme production task, was chosen as the means of investigating disyllabic rhyming skill in the present study. This task has the additional advantage of mimicking spontaneous language play. A longitudinal study of this phenomenon by Inkelas (2003) documented one child's spontaneous monosyllabic and polysyllabic rhyme productions. In the early stages of the game, when the child was 2 years old, disyllabic rhyme was based on the superrime unit if primary (and sole) stress fell on the initial syllable but, if the final syllable received either primary or secondary stress, rhyme was based on the final rime unit. By age 4, disyllabic rhyme was only based on the final rime unit if the final syllable received primary stress. Inkelas attributed this sequence to early exposure to storybook rhyme patterns followed by the increasing influence of linguistic rhyme. As mispronunciation errors were observed to decrease during this period, the change in rhyming behaviour could also reflect the maturation of the child's phonological representations for polysyllabic words.
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
In summary, competing predictions may be made about the outcome of the disyllabic rhyme production task. One possibility is that, just as monosyllabic rhyme is held to reflect the accessibility of the rime unit within the syllable (Treiman, 1987; Goswami & Bryant, 1990), disyllabic rhyme may reflect the internal structure of disyllabic words. The two accounts of disyllabic word structure illustrated in Figure 1 differ in... |
More articles from British Journal of Psychology
Sex differences in the effects of interest on boys' and girls' reading..., May 01, 2007
Empathizing and systemizing: what are they, and what do they contribut..., May 01, 2007
Effects of post-cue interval on intentional forgetting., May 01, 2007
The location of trait emotional intelligence in personality factor spa..., May 01, 2007
Characterizing linguistic structure with mutual information., May 01, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Click here
to search our database of over 3 million articles.
|
