It Doesn’t Matter Whether Onset and Rime Predicts ReadingBetter Than Phoneme Awareness Does or Vice Versa

Peter Bryant

Department of Experimental Psychology

University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Hulme et al. argue against our hypothesis that there are two routes from onset and rimeawareness to reading: an indirect routewhereby onset–rime awareness feeds into thedevelopment of phoneme awareness which in turn affects children’s reading, and a directroute by which onset–rime awareness makes an independent contribution to children’sreading. The evidence that Hulme et al. present against this hypothesis is not convincing,partly because our hypothesis actually predicts most of their results and partly because ofweaknesses in the design of Hulme et al.’s study and in the unusual procedures that theyemployed. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)

The paper by Hulme, Hatcher, Nation, Adams, and Stuart gave me muchpleasure and very little pain. It pleased me in two ways. One was by showinghow our own hypothesis, which has been around now in various forms for over20 years (Bradley & Bryant, 1978, 1983a, 1983b; Bryant & Bradley, 1985;Bryant, MacLean, Bradley, & Crossland, 1990; Goswami & Bryant, 1990), hasonce again provoked some interesting research. I like it when this happensbecause my own view of psychological hypotheses is that they are all wrong. Ihave produced a large number of hypotheses over the years, and most of themhave been shown to be wrong, usually by myself, which does not worry me atall. The mark of a good psychological hypothesis, in my view, is not that it isperfectly right, which is an impossibility, but that it leads to further researchwhich in the end produces a better, less imperfect, hypothesis, and so on. On thatcriterion we have scored.

The second way that the paper pleased me was to show how closely Hulme etal. followed the research plan that I set out 2 years ago (Bryant, 1998). I proposeda longitudinal study in which exactly the same methods (oddity, detection, and soon) would be used to measure children’s awareness of different phonologicalunits in order to gauge the relative importance of these various units in children’sreading. Later that year I took up my own suggestion by organizing a longitudi-nal study of children’s reading in which we used the same methods to measure

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Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 82,41–46 (2002)doi:10.1006/jecp.2002.2672

0022-0965/02 $35.00© 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)

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Address correspondence and reprint requests to Peter Bryant, Department of ExperimentalPsychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford CX1 3UD, England.

children’s awareness of phonemes, onsets, and rimes. So, I now learn to my sur-prise, did Hulme and his colleagues. It is always good to see one’s own advicebeing followed, and it was also good in this case to find that, about methods atleast, they and I have been in happy agreement.

It would be grand if we could have been as united about theory, but we are not,especially when it comes to the hypothesis set out by myself and my colleaguesso many years ago. In a nutshell Hulme et al. report two main results, both ofwhich they advance as convincing evidence against our hypothesis. One is thatchildren’s awareness of phonemes is a very strong predictor of their reading anda stronger predictor than onset and rime awareness is. The other is that children’sonset and rime scores do not predict their reading when differences in phonemeawareness are controlled.

The first finding is not, as Hulme et al. claim, evidence against our hypothe-sis. In fact, part of our hypothesis rests on the assumption of a strong relationbetween children’s phoneme awareness and their reading and spelling. The sec-ond result does not fit well with another part of our hypothesis, and that part ofthe hypothesis may therefore be wrong. However there are serious weaknessesin Hulme et al.’s procedure and in their design that make their claims unper-suasive. Our own recent longitudinal work has produced some very differentresults.

So I am reluctant to abandon our ideas about phonological awareness straight-away. To justify this reluctance, I shall clarify those ideas and the nature of theevidence that would bear on them.

OUR HYPOTHESIS ABOUT LEARNING TO READ

I shall continue to say “our” hypothesis because that is what it is, an hypothe-sis achieved jointly by my colleagues Lynette Bradley and Usha Goswami and bymyself. However, since 1990 the three of us have gone separate ways and haveexplored different aspects of children’s reading, and I cannot be sure that my ver-sion of our joint hypothesis is still the exactly the same as theirs.

As I see it, our joint hypothesis is that children’s awareness of onset and rimeaffects their reading and spelling in two separate ways. The first is by an indirectroute (Model 2 in Bryant et al., 1990, and Goswami & Bryant, 1990, Chap. 6).Before children learn to read, they are sensitive to onsets and rimes, but hardly tophonemes. As they become more experienced with onsets and rimes, they devel-op the ability to divide these units up into the smaller units of phonemes as well.The greater a child’s sensitivity to onsets and rimes in the preschool period, thequicker he or she will learn about phonemes and therefore about grapheme–phoneme rules, which of course will affect the child’s initial progress in readingand spelling. “Sensitivity to rhyme and alliteration are developmental precursorsof phoneme detection, which, in turn, plays a considerable role in learning toread” (Bryant et al., 1990, p. 437).

This part of our hypothesis does predict a relation between children’s aware-ness of rime before they learn to read and their reading later on. It also makes a

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prediction, which Hulme et al. ignore, about phoneme awareness. It predicts—indeed it depends on—a strong relation between children’s phoneme awarenessand their reading and spelling. Another essential prediction derived from the indi-rect route is a relation between children’s awareness of onset and rime beforetheylearn to read and their growing awareness of phonemes later on, a relation that wehave established as true (Bryant et al., 1990).

The second link between onset and rime awareness and reading and spelling,we argued, is by a direct route(Model 3 in Bryant et al., 1990 and Goswami &Bryant, 1990, Chap. 6). These intrasyllabic units often consist of more than onephoneme and for that reason are often represented in writing by sequences of let-ters. The relation between these letter sequences and rimes, in particular, is fre-quently very stable in English (for example, the sequence “-ight” consistentlyrepresents the same sound). So, it is useful to children to learn not just aboutgrapheme–phoneme relations but also about reliable relations between lettersequences and intrasyllabic sounds. We argued, therefore, that children’s pre-school awareness of onsets and rimes prepares them to learn about such lettersequences when it is time for them to do so. This part of our hypothesis states thatpreschool awareness of onset and rime has an effect on children’s reading that isindependent of their awareness of phonemes, and the hypothesis therefore pre-dicts a relation between onset–rime awareness and reading even after differencesin phoneme awareness have been controlled.

Misinterpretations of the Indirect Route

The predictive strength of phoneme awareness. Hulme et al. get our ideas aboutthe indirect route seriously wrong in several different ways. Their most importantmisunderstanding is about the significance of the strong connection they havefound between phoneme awareness and reading. They repeatedly advance thisresult as evidence against our theory but are quite wrong to do so.

It is an essential part of our idea of the indirect route that there should be astrong connection between children’s phoneme awareness and their reading andspelling. The indirect route, by which onset and rime awareness feeds intophoneme awareness which then strongly affects children’s reading, obviouslywould not work if no such connection existed. Some time ago (Bryant et al., 1990)we ourselves produced clear evidence for a strong connection between phonemescores and reading with 5- to 6-year-old children who were thus exactly the sameage as the children studied by Hulme et al. All the evidence that Hulme et al.advance for this compelling connection fits well with our hypothesis and also withour previous results.

The comparison between phoneme awareness and onset–rime awareness. Wehave always claimed that children’s phoneme awareness plays an important partin the initial stages of reading, and we have not claimed that rime awarenessmust be a better predictor than phoneme awareness of children’s reading. Yet, alarge part of Hulme et al.’s argument about the link between phoneme aware-ness and reading is based on their evidence that phoneme awareness predicts

ONSET, RIME, AND PHONEME AWARENESS 43

children’s reading better than onset and rime awareness does. However, I see nopoint in comparisons between the strengths of different phonological predictors,even though Hulme et al. base their whole paper on this contrast. Surely the aimof any good developmental psychologist here should be to find out how phono-logical awareness works—how it affects reading—and not which phonologicalunit gives us the stronger predictor. Our own idea that rime awareness feeds intophoneme awareness which in turn feeds into reading and spelling is an ideaabout the intricate mechanisms of development, not about the relative strengthsof predictions.

Hulme et al.’s mistake arises from their neglect of our idea of the indirect route.They never mention our discovery (Bryant et al., 1990) that children’s preschoolawareness of rime predicts their phoneme awareness later on, though it was oneof the main purposes of that paper to explore this relation. Children’s early sen-sitivity to onset and rime feeds into the later development of phoneme awareness.

Spelling, then reading? Goswami and I (1990) followed Frith’s (1985) sugges-tion that phoneme awareness affects children’s spelling before it affects theirreading. We claimed that children use their knowledge of phonemes from the startin learning how to spell, but we accepted Frith’s idea that this might not be so ofchildren’s reading. So we argued that, though both the indirect and the directroute operate from the start with spelling, there might be a limited period whenonly the direct route, but not the indirect route, operates with reading. We knewthat this would have to be a very limited period because we (Bryant et al., 1990)had shown, and now Hulme et al. confirm, that reading is heavily affected byphoneme awareness in children as young as 61/2.

In fact at the time we had no good longitudinal evidence for the idea of a dis-crepancy between reading and spelling, and my recent longitudinal work suggeststhat both routes operate in reading as well as in spelling from the start. So, I amquite happy to drop this idea of a discrepancy between reading and spelling andto agree that phoneme awareness (through the direct route) affects children’sreading from the moment that they begin to learn to read.

The direct route and Hulme et al.’s results

The idea of the indirect route assumes that phoneme awareness plays a signif-icant role in children’s reading and spelling from the start. The direct routeassumes that children also learn about letter sequences which correspond toonsets and rimes and that they may do so quite early on in learning to read. Thusthe direct route does lead to the idea that onset and rime awareness might makean independent and unique contribution to reading, though not necessarily astronger predictive contribution than phoneme awareness.

This is the part of our hypothesis that the Hulme et al. study comes nearest totouching. For they found that the children’s rime scores no longer predicted theirreading when differences in phoneme awareness were controlled, and this is notwhat we predicted. So, it could very well be that the direct route does not exist,and I should like to add at this point that our own original evidence for this route

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(Bryant et al., 1990) was rather weak. We did manage to predict reading from acombined onset–rime score after controls for differences in phoneme awareness,but the onsets in this onset–rime score were also single phonemes. I am not cer-tain, therefore, that this combined score was a pure measure of intrasyllabic, asopposed to phoneme, awareness.

Should we abandon the direct route altogether? I am reluctant to take this stepnow, for a number of reasons. One is that in our own recent longitudinal studychildren’s rime scores at the beginning of the project did predict their reading andspelling later on even after we controlled for differences in their awareness ofphonemes. The difference may reflect Hulme et al.’s unusual procedure of givingfeedback after each trial and thus turning their phonological awareness tasks intophonological training tasks. The children’s scores, particularly in the more diffi-cult phoneme tasks, may have been determined by their ability to learn a newskill, at least as much as by their basic awareness of phonemes.

Another reason for keeping the direct route in play is that the alternative ideathat the only important phonological unit in reading is the phoneme is unlikely.Indisputably most readers use larger units than that (see Taft, 1991). Hulme et al.themselves say as much toward the end of their paper. In my opinion the impor-tant question is not whetherthe direct route is viable, but when(which may beaffected by teaching practices) and how it begins to work.

CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THE HULME ET AL. STUDY

The Hulme et al. study was provoked by our hypothesis and is presented as arebuttal of that hypothesis. It is no such thing. But it does confirm the importanceof phoneme awareness. The study’s most impressive contribution is in some of itspredictive analyses, in which the outcome measure was the children’s reading atthe end of the project, where Hulme et al. controlled for differences in reading atthe time that the phonological measures were taken. This was certainly ingenious.We ourselves took the same step in our recent longitudinal study and we foundthat onset and rime awareness as well as phoneme awareness predicted readingafter this control.

However, the power of all of Hulme et al.’s predictive analyses is sullied bytheir failure to include another, essential, control in their study. They did notmeasure the children’s IQs and so they were unable to control for differences inthis powerful variable. Some or even all of their positive results might be due todifferences in the children’s IQs rather than in their phonological awareness.

The absence of this control is particularly serious, given the strong possibilityof a confusion in their study between phonological awareness and learning. Allthe phonological tasks, as I mentioned earlier, were effectively learning taskssince the children were given feedback after every trial. IQ is a good predictor oflearning at school, and so IQ scores would have helped Hulme et al. to disentan-gle learning from awareness. One must, therefore, take very seriously the possi-bility that Hulme et al. measured the connection between learning and readingrather than between awareness and reading.

ONSET, RIME, AND PHONEME AWARENESS 45

REFERENCESBradley, L., & Bryant, P. (1978). Difficulties in auditory organisation as a possible cause of reading

backwardness. Nature, 271,746–747.Bradley, L., & Bryant, P. E. (1983a). Categorising sounds and learning to read: a causal connection.

Nature, 301,419–21.Bradley, L., & Bryant, P.E. (1983b). Rhyme and reason in reading and spelling. Ann Arbor: University

of Michigan Press.Bryant, P. (1998). Sensitivity to onset and rhyme does predict young children’s reading: A comment

on Muter, Hulme, Snowling and Taylor (1997). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 71,29–37.

Bryant, P., & Bradley, L. (1985). Children’s reading problems. Oxford: Blackwell.Bryant, P. E., MacLean, M., Bradley, L. L., & Crossland. (1990). Rhyme and alliteration, phoneme

detection, and learning to read. Developmental Psychology, 26,429–438.Frith, U. (1985) Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia. In K. Patterson, M. Coltheart and J.

Marshall (Eds.), Surface dyslexia(pp. 301–330. London: Erlbaum.)Muter, V., Hulme, C., Snowling, M., & Taylor, S. (1998). Segmentation, not rhyming, predicts early

progress in learning to read. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 71,3–27.Taft, M. (1991) Reading and the mental lexicon. Hove, UK: Erlbaum.

Received January 8, 2001; revised February 8, 2001

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