Rimes and superrimes: an exploration of children's disyllabic rhyming skills

The study investigated the extension of rhyme awareness to disyllabic stimuli. Three experiments are reported which examine the disyllabic rhyme production skills of adults and of children in their first, second or third year of schooling. Stress pattern and phonological rime and superrime neighbourhood density were manipulated. Rhyming skills were influenced by stress pattern. With initial stress, rhyming responses were based predominantly on the superrime but with final stress, rhyming responses variously shared the superrime, the final syllable and the final rime unit with the target. Neighbourhood density affected the likelihood of production of a real word rhyming response. Some implications for the organization of an orthographic lexicon of multisyllables are discussed.