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A CVCC rhyming test, which had two slightly different types of auditory differentiation, was given to 273 kindergarten to third-grade children. A related rhyming test was also given to 62 of the kindergarten children. The rhyming category which required differentiation at the ends of words was more difficult than the category which required differentiation within the words. Correct responses increased with successive grade levels, but category differences remained. Sex differences were not significant. The rhyming test which had initial consonant similarities of stimulus and nonrhyming response words was more difficult for the kindergarten children than the rhyming test which did not have such similarities.

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Four experiments were conducted to examine the validity of artificial orthography as a research device. Although widely cited studies have used several artificial orthographies to investigate basic reading processes, this study seems to indicate that artificial orthographies are not comparable to each other or to the English alphabet. Two experiments used paired associate tasks with kindergarten, first-grade, and college students; one experiment used a transfer task with first-grade students; one experiment used a visual discrimination task with kindergarten students. Varying results were obtained with the orthographies as a function of (a) the type of task the student was required to perform, (b) the age of the student, (c) the size of the stimuli, and (d) the number of response distractors presented. The results indicate that the use of artificial orthography is not valid when findings are generalized from artificial orthographies to the English alphabet and from various aged individuals to the way young children learn actual letters and words in English.

One hundred and eighty-nine kindergarten children were given a CVCC rhyming test which included four slightly different types of auditory differentiation. They obtained a greater number of correct scores on categories that provided maximum contrasts of final consonant sounds than they did on categories that provided less than maximum contrasts of final consonant sounds. For both sexes, significant differences were found between the categories; although the sex differences were not significant, girls made more correct rhyming responses than boys on the most difficult category.