Onsets and rimes in a phonologically transparent orthography: differences between good and poor beginning readers of Dutch.

This study investigates whether beginning readers of Dutch develop onset-rime units when these units are emphasized in their reading method, even when the orthography is transparent at the grapheme-phoneme level. The speed of naming intact pseudowords (wot) was compared with the speed of naming pseudowords with an onset-rime (w ot) or body-coda (wo t) segmentation. Whereas body-coda items consistently slowed down naming for both good and poor readers, the onset-rime effect covaried with reading skill: it changed from inhibitory for good readers to facilitatory for poor readers. Two alternative explanations are proposed.