The importance of phonological awareness (PA) for later acquired skills including reading and writing have repeatedly been reported (e.g. Lundberg, Olofsson, & Wall, 1980) such that preliterate skills in PA predicts reading and writing up to at least 11 years after (MacDonald & Cornwall, 1995). In the current study behavioural measures of PA along with Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded. ERPs record the electrical activity of the brain online sampling millisecond by millisecond such that differences in processing between groups that may not be evident in behavioural measures are possible to discern. Previous ERP studies of auditory rhyming showed the classical phonological rhyming effect (RE; N450) to be evident in children as young as 6 years of age (Coch, Grossi, Skendzel, & Neville, 2005). ERPs to spoken nonword targets (introduced to eliminate effects of semantic skills) preceded by nonrhyming nonwords showed increased negativity (400-600ms post-stimulus-onset) in comparison to rhyming targets, and this effect was largest at posterior medial sites bilaterally. Thus the previous research suggests that the neurocognitive networks involved in processing auditory rhyme information are comparable to adults by the age of 6. The current study (1) extends this finding to younger children aged 3, 4 and 5 years and (2) to bilingual, late learners of English aged 6-8.

Behaviourally, the proportion of monolingual children with proficiency in rhyming (production and recognition skills) increased as a function of age. When comparing the RE across age groups, no differences were found in amplitude. However, the timing of the onset of the RE decreased linearly with age, indicating faster processing of the auditory stimuli in older children. An examination of 4-year-old children with different levels of rhyming proficiency revealed similar differences in the RE. Specifically, the onset of the RE was earlier in children with higher rhyming skills as compared to children of similar age with lower rhyming skills. A late rhyming effect (600-800 ms), i.e. an increased negativity to nonrhyming targets with a different distribution than the previously reported RE, was found in high but not low proficient 4-year olds. We hypothesized that this effect was related to verbal short-term memory indicating task difficulty being higher for younger (4-year olds) than older (6-8 year olds) monolingual children. This same effect was found in native Spanish speaking bilingual children aged 6-8 with roughly 2.5 years of experience of English. The significance of these effects will be discussed in the frameworks of language proficiency and age.