Modeling the Relationship Between Prosodic Sensitivity and Early Literacy

Abstract

A growing literature has demonstrated that prosodic sensitivity is related to early literacy development; however, the precise nature of this relationship remains unclear. It has been speculated in recent theoretical models that the observed relationship between prosodic sensitivity and early literacy might be partially mediated by children ' s vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness, although such models have yet to be confirmed using advanced statistical techniques. The study reported here uses covariance structure modeling to provide the first direct test of the model proposed by Wood, Wade-Woolley, and Holliman. We also test a modified version of this model that was designed to overcome some of the limitations in the original. Seventy-five 5-7-year-old English-speaking children completed a new measure of prosodic sensitivity and were also assessed for their vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, word reading, and spelling. The results showed that Wood et al. ' s model did not provide an adequate fit to our sample data; however, the new model, which permitted causal connections between the so-called mediator variables, provided an excellent fit. We argue that prosodic sensitivity should be afforded greater importance in models of literacy development, and offer a new theoretical model of the prosody-literacy relationship for future attempts at replication.

Examining the independent contribution of prosodic sensitivity to word reading and spelling in early readers

“…Children were asked to decide: 1) whether they heard a compound noun (e.g., "ladybird") or a noun phrase (e.g., "lady", "bird"), inspired by, and adapted from, the work of Kitzen (2001), Whalley and Hansen (2006), and Wells and Peppé (2003); 2) whether or not a word was articulated correctly based on the stress pattern (e.g., "kangaroo" verses "KANgaroo"), inspired by, and adapted from, the work of Wood (2006) and Holliman et al (2008Holliman et al ( , 2010aHolliman et al ( , 2010bHolliman et al ( , 2012; 3) whether they were being asked something, implied by a rise in intonation (e.g., "/the farmer milks the cow"), or told something, implied by a fall in intonation (e.g., "\the farmer milks the cow"), inspired by, and adapted from, the work of Hadding and StuddertKennedy (1974) and Wells and Peppé (2003); 4) which of two utterances matched a "Ba-Ba" utterance based on the stress pattern; for example, BA ba BA (strong-weakstrong) would correspond with "Fish and Chips" (strong-weak-strong) rather than "Spaghetti" (weak-strong-weak), inspired by, and adapted from, the work of Kitzen (2001), Whalley and Hansen (2006), and Holliman, Williams et al (2014). In line with other research in this area (e.g., Holliman, Critten et al, 2014) performance in each task was pooled into a global measure of prosodic sensitivity. The internal reliability (Cronbach's ) was .708.…”

“…Prosody may only have an indirect influence mediated by phonological and morphological awareness as demonstrated by Holliman, Critten et al (2014). A second possibility is that the relationship was not uncovered by this particular study due to limitations in the methodology and sample age.…”

“…This model and the subsequent empirical assessment by Holliman, Critten et al (2014) only considered a contribution from prosody to word reading and spelling mediated by other variables. However, we posited that prosodic sensitivity facilitates the development of phonological representations of words not only in terms of segmental phonology (e.g., phonemes and rhymes) but also suprasegmental phonology, particularly word stress.…”

“…In the only published examination of the Wood et al (2009) model to date, Holliman, Critten et al (2014) found in a sample of 75 five to seven-year-old children that morphological awareness and phonological awareness (rhyme) were strong PROSODY AND EARLY LITERACY 8 mediators between prosodic sensitivity and word reading, and between prosodic sensitivity and spelling. This provided some support for the model, however as acknowledged by the authors, the findings were somewhat limited given the size and broad age range of the sample and the relatively low internal reliability for the prosodic sensitivity measure.…”

“…Indeed, in the aforementioned Holliman, Critten et al (2014) study it is noteworthy that a direct pathway from prosodic sensitivity to word reading and spelling was not conceptualised and thus, was not examined. However it is plausible that, prosodic sensitivity might also have a direct role in word reading as stress assignment is necessary for reading aloud multisyllabic words.…”