Facts In Action

A researcher at the University of Maine sought to determine if including rhymes in a story causes young children to become more attentive to word sounds. Previous findings have suggested that the use of rhyme enhances early reading skills because it increases children's knowledge of the similarities and differences between consonant and vowel sounds.

The forty children who took part in the study, all between the ages of three and five, were split into two groups. One group heard the rhyming version of a story ("Can Kate come to play? Please can she come and stay all day?") and the other group heard a non-rhyming version ("Can Kate come to play? Please can she come and stay until dark?"). Immediately after hearing the story, the children were shown pairs of pictures that compared 12 sets of words, such as "bus-lip," "ring-king," "sled-bed," and "bear-man," and were asked if the words in each pair sounded alike or different. The experiment found that children who had listened to the rhyming story were significantly more accurate in judging similar versus dissimilar sounding words than the children who heard the non-rhyming story.

These results pose a dilemma for early childhood education in that previous (non-experimental) research indicates that rhyming stories have a negative effect on story comprehension for children. Therefore, the selection of books and materials for preschoolers may be informed by whether the storytelling is designed to increase understanding of story content or aimed at developing reading skills.

Source:
"Young Children's Phonological Sensitivity After Exposure to a Rhyming or Nonrhyming Story," D. Hayes, The Journal of Genetic Psychology, Volume 3, Number 162, 2001.

For more information:
contact Donald Hayes, University of Maine, Department of Psychology, Orono, ME 04469.

Facts in Action, December, 2001