Psychology Commons^™

Rhyme: A Tool For Word Learning, Kristen Elizabeth Thompson Mills

Masters Theses

To become successful readers, children must be able to recognize how changes in sound correspond to changes in word meaning. Rhymes, which contain minimal pair words that differ in their initial phoneme but share final vowels and codas (e.g., the cat in the hat), are often used in preschool and kindergarten classrooms as a tool to promote literacy and word learning. Although young language learners can generally discriminate minimal pair words, they often show difficulty when asked to assign them as labels for separate novel objects. The present experiment investigated the role of experience with rhyme on the mapping of …