Sensitivity to onset and rhyme does predict young Children's reading: a comment on Muter, Hulme, Snowling, and Taylor (1997).

Muter, Hulme, Snowling, and Taylor (1997) claimed that measures of phoneme segmentation, and not measures of rhyme, predict young children's reading. They base this claim on the relative predictive success of two rhyme and two phoneme segmentation tasks. However, there is a problem with one of their two rhyme measures, the Rhyme Detection measure. The children were asked to select a choice word which "rhymes with or sounds like" a target word, but the authors only scored rhyme choices ("boat"-"coat") as correct. Choices of words with the same onset as the target ("train"-"tractor") were counted as mistakes, even though these latter choices also shared a common sound with the target. A better way to score the task is to count onset as well as rhyme choices as correct. The new score predicts reading and spelling as well as the phoneme tasks. This result is consistent with the hypothesis of Goswami and Bryant (1990) that sensitivity to onset and rhyme, as well as awareness of phonemes, plays a part in children's success in reading and to spelling.