Orthographic analogies and phonological priming: a comment on Bowey, Vaughan, and Hansen (1998)

J. A. Bowey, L. Vaughan, and J. Hansen (1998, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 68, 108-133) carried out two experiments on 6- and 7-year-old children's use of orthographic analogies in word reading. They reported that, following apparently stringent controls for phonological priming effects, beginning analogies (beak-bean) were more frequent in this age group than rime (beak-peak) analogies. From this, they concluded that beginning readers do not reliably use orthographic rimes in reading, even in the clue word task (p. 129). However, the clue word task was not used in this study. This comment highlights two problems with Bowey et al.'s paper. The first is a theoretical one, and the second is methodological. Firstly, Bowey et al. base their investigation on a misunderstanding of U. Goswami and P. E. Bryant's (1990, Phonological skills and learning to read, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum) claims about the role of rhyme and analogy in beginning reading. Secondly, methodological weaknesses, in particular unintended intralist priming effects, seriously limit the conclusions that can be drawn from Bowey et al.'s booklet analogy task.