Poor readers' ability to detect speech rhythm and perceive rapid speech

Abstract

Recent research indicates that the rhythmic properties of speech may indicate to the infant listener where word boundaries are most likely to occur. However, rhythmic awareness is not included in present discussions of phonological awareness. It is suggested that skills which develop in early infancy to facilitate speech perception (i.e. awareness of rhythm) may have an impact upon later phonological development and literacy. This paper outlines a cross-sectional study, designed to examine whether poor readers do show a specific insensitivity to rhythm in speech, and whether they also exhibit signs of inefficient speech perception. Thirty primary school children identified as poor readers were matched for age and gender, and for reading age and gender with two groups of children reading at a level comparable with their chronological age ('normal' readers) ( N = 90). All children completed a battery of tasks, including an * Requests for reprints.

Does speech rhythm sensitivity predict children's reading ability 1 year later?

“…Indeed, children who perform well on this measure of speech rhythm (the revised mispronunciations task) are likely to be more sensitive to stress, have the ability to reverse stress patterns in two-syllable words, and be better able to identify and decode phonemes in words and match these words to those stored in the mental lexicon (Chiat, 1983;Kitzen, 2001;Wood, 2006). Sensitivity to stress may also help children to identify onset rhyme boundaries, which enables and facilitates analogy (Goswami, 2003;Goswami et al, 2002) and may also help to identify word boundaries, facilitating spoken word recognition skills and subsequent vocabulary development (Kitzen, 2001;Lindfield et al, 1999;Metsala, 1997;Wood & Terrell, 1998).…”

“…More recently, Holliman, Wood, and Sheehy (2008) found that performance on this task could predict a significant amount of unique variance in word reading (3.8%) in a group of early readers after controlling for age, vocabulary, phoneme deletion, and rhyme detection ability (phonological awareness). Links between speech rhythm and word reading have also been demonstrated in other recent studies involving stress manipulation and sensitivity (Gutierrez-Palma & Reyes, 2007;Holliman, Wood, & Sheehy, 2009, in press;Wood & Terrell, 1998). Goswami et al (2002) investigated whether reading difficulties are associated with deficits in perceptual rhythmic timing.…”

“…Such a route to reading ability has been partially supported by Lindfield, Wingfield, and Goodglass (1999), who argued that word-level stress facilitates the perceptual matching process (spoken word recognition), which provides a means for accessing lexical representations, and aids the retrieval of words from the lexicon. In summary, sensitivity to stress (an aspect of speech rhythm) may help infants to segment fluent speech into interpretable units, thus facilitating spoken word recognition, which has been linked to proficient reading (see Metsala, 1997;Wood & Terrell, 1998); this may also be mediated by vocabulary and phonological awareness.…”

Habilidades fonológicas suprasegmentales y desarrollo lector en niños de educación primaria

“…Así, plantean que el reconocimiento del lenguaje hablado facilita la adquisición del vocabulario, lo que a su vez fomenta el desarrollo de la CF y, por lo tanto, el de la habilidad de lectoescritura (Adams, 1990). Contemplan también que la conciencia prosódica podría afectar directamente a la CF dado que la percepción de los fonemas es más fácil en las sílabas acentuadas (Wood y Terrell, 1998). Otra forma en que la conciencia prosódica podría relacionarse con las habilidades de lectura sería mediante la conciencia morfológica, puesto que en algunas palabras cambia el acento si se añaden sufijos; la detección de estos cambios de acento facilitaría el aprendizaje de los sufijos, lo que llevaría a su vez a una mejor ejecución lectora.…”

Relations Among Detection of Syllable Stress, Speech Abnormalities, and Communicative Ability in Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Based on previous related findings reporting impaired perception of pragmatic, affective and grammatical prosody cues in ASD (see McCann & Peppé, 2003;O'Connor, 2012;Kujala et al, 2013 for reviews), it is predicted that the group with ASD would exhibit reduced performance on our syllable stress perception task compared to the comparison group. Deficits in the primary perception of syllable stress could have negative consequences in learning how different acoustic versions of utterances convey different meanings, which in turn could result in atypical receptive and expressive prosodic abilities, communication skills and overall language acquisition (Cutler, Oahan, & van Donselaar, 1997;Mehta & Cutler, 1988;Pierrhumbert, 2003, Wood & Terrell, 1998. In addition, this study aimed to investigate the associations between stress perception and communicative abilities in individuals with ASD.…”