Children's Use of Analogy in Learning to Read: A Developmental Study

If children are able to make analogies between the spelling patterns in words, this would have important consequences for theories of reading development, as a child who knew a word like beak could use analogy to read new words like peak and bean. A study is reported which compared the ability of children at three different reading levels to use analogy in reading both real and nonsense words. The results showed that even very young children can successfully use analogy to decode new words. This finding suggests that analogy has a role to play in the initial stages of reading acquisition.