The research addresses the role of lexical analogies in early reading by examining variation in children's self-reported strategy choices in the context of a traditional clue-word reading task. Sixty 5- to 6-year-old beginning readers were given a nonword version of a traditional clue-word reading analogy task, and changes in strategies were examined using measures of immediately retrospective verbal reports. The findings revealed that the children's performance was accompanied by their use of a wide repertoire of reading strategies, the most prominent being the use of lexical analogies and grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules. Distinct profiles of reading were derived from an analysis of the children's strategy choice, showing strong patterns of individual differences with regard to the extent to which children reported making analogical responses and applying grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules to aid their nonword reading. The benefits of using immediately retrospective verbal reports of strategies as a way of examining individual differences in children's early reading are discussed.