It is well established that speech, language and phonological skills are closely associated with literacy, and that children with a family risk of dyslexia (FRD) tend to show deficits in each of these areas in the preschool years. This paper examines what the relationships are between FRD and these skills, and whether deficits in speech, language and phonological processing fully account for the increased risk of dyslexia in children with FRD. One hundred and fifty-three 4-6-year-old children, 44 of whom had FRD, completed a battery of speech, language, phonology and literacy tasks. Word reading and spelling were retested 6 months later, and text reading accuracy and reading comprehension were tested 3 years later. The children with FRD were at increased risk of developing difficulties in reading accuracy, but not reading comprehension. Four groups were compared: good and poor readers with and without FRD. In most cases good readers outperformed poor readers regardless of family history, but there was an effect of family history on naming and nonword repetition regardless of literacy outcome, suggesting a role for speech production skills as an endophenotype of dyslexia. Phonological processing predicted spelling, while language predicted text reading accuracy and comprehension. FRD was a significant additional predictor of reading and spelling after controlling for speech production, language and phonological processing, suggesting that children with FRD show additional difficulties in literacy that cannot be fully explained in terms of their language and phonological skills.

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Prosody awareness (the rhythmic patterning of speech) accounts for unique variance in reading development. However, studies have thus far focused on early-readers and utilised literacy measures which fail to distinguish between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. The current study investigated the factors that are specifically associated with multisyllabic word reading in a sample of fifty children aged between 7-and 8-years. Prosodic awareness was the strongest predictor of multisyllabic word reading accuracy, after controlling for phoneme awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary, and short-term memory. Children also made surprisingly few phonemic errors while, in contrast, errors of stress assignment were commonplace. Prosodic awareness was also the strongest predictor of stress placement errors, although this finding was not significant. Prosodic skills may play an increasingly important role in literacy performance as children encounter more complex reading materials. Once phoneme-level skills are mastered, prosodic awareness is arguably the strongest predictor of single word reading.

The current experiment investigated conflicting predictions regarding the effects of spelling-stress regularity on the lexical decision performance of skilled adult readers and adults with developmental dyslexia. In both reading groups, lexical decision responses were significantly faster and significantly more accurate when the orthographic structure of a word ending was a reliable as opposed to an unreliable predictor of lexical stress assignment. Furthermore, the magnitude of this spelling-stress regularity effect was found to be equivalent across reading groups. These findings are consistent with intact phoneme-level regularity effects also observed in dyslexia. The paper discusses how findings of intact spelling-sound regularity effects at both prosodic and phonemic levels, as well as other similar results, can be reconciled with the obvious difficulties that people with dyslexia experience in other domains of phonological processing.