Exploring rhyming and reading with ERPs

Abstract

Learning to read words in alphabetic languages like English or Swedish involves mapping the sounds of language to the print on the page. This is particularly challenging for languages with a “deep orthography” (in which the print-to-sound mappings are not simply 1:1), like English. A deep orthography makes deciding whether two written words rhyme or not more than just a visual matching task (e.g., boat and goat rhyme, but so do brain and cane). I will discuss some studies of the event-related potential (ERP) rhyming effect in children and adults suggesting that it is essentially a phonological priming effect, as well as a few studies with adults suggesting that it might reveal more about lexical processing. Within the frame of Educational Linguistics, language is foundational to reading and learning to read, yet reading involves many levels of analysis. Building educator knowledge at different levels of analysis is consistent with an evidence-informed, “science of reading” approach.