The role of lexical representations and phonological overlap in rhyme judgments of beginning, intermediate and advanced readers

► We examined the role of global similarity relations in rhyme judgments of readers. ► Children and adults judged rhyming, globally similar and unrelated pairs. ► All showed a global similarity effect in accuracy, only adults in response latency. ► The effect does not seem to be the result of ill-defined lexical representations. ► Instead, the effect may be related to more fundamental similarity processing skills.