The role of prosodic sensitivity in children's reading development

Abstract

While the critical importance of phonological awareness (segmental phonology) to reading ability is well established, the potential role of prosody (suprasegmental phonology) in reading development has only recently been explored. This study examined the relationship between children's prosodic skills and reading ability. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses examined the unique contribution of wordlevel and phrase-level prosodic skills to the prediction of three concurrent measures of reading ability in 81 fourth-grade children (mean age 9.3 years). After controlling for phonological awareness and general rhythmic sensitivity, children's prosodic skills predicted unique variation in word-reading accuracy and in reading comprehension. Phrase-level prosodic skills, assessed by means of a reiterative speech task, predicted unique variance in reading comprehension, after controlling for word reading accuracy, phonological awareness and general rhythmic sensitivity. These results add to the growing body of evidence of the importance of prosodic skills in reading development.

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

“…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. Certainly there is some empirical evidence for a direct role in word reading as while prosodic sensitivity is associated with vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness, it can also predict word reading independently of this association (e.g., Holliman et al, 2008;Whalley & Hansen, 2006). Such findings have been replicated more recently (see Calet, Gutiérrez-Palma, Simpson, González-Trujillo, & Defior, 2015) where it was argued that prosodic sensitivity may have a direct effect on word reading.…”

“…Over the last 16 years in particular a literature has been developing that implicates a role for prosody in reading acquisition (e.g., Goswami et al, 2002;Goswami, Gerson & Astruc, 2010;Holliman, Wood, & Sheehy, 2008, 2010a, 2010bLeong, Hämäläinen, Soltész, & Goswami, 2011;Schwanenflugel, Hamilton, Kuhn, Wisenbaker, & Stahl, 2004;Whalley & Hansen, 2006). However, a key challenge remains in understanding the mechanisms by which prosody influences reading (and spelling) and whether it has a direct effect and/or an indirect effect via other mediating variables.…”

“…During the task, children had to help the main character, Brenda, to overcome four different challenges on the animal park -these were carefully designed to capture a range of prosodic features such as stress, intonation, and timing. 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.…”

Focus in Dutch reading: an eye-tracking experiment with heritage speakers of Turkish

“…Veenendaal, Groen, and Verhoeven (2014) found that, besides reading aloud prosody, proficiency in speech prosody (as elicited in a story-telling task) had a positive effect on reading comprehension. Whalley and Hansen (2006) demonstrated that children with a poorer performance on accent placement in a reiterative speech task performed poorer on reading comprehension than children with a better prosodic proficiency (see also Holliman, Wood, & Sheehy, 2010a, 2010b. Similarly, prosodic sensitivity appears to be highly predictive of reading proficiency in children with developmental dyslexia (e.g.…”

Speech rhythm and temporal structure: Converging perspectives?

“…For example, sensitivity to prosodic patterns in dyslexia can be measured using a reiterant speech task, the "DeeDee" task (Whalley and Hansen 2006). Here each syllable in a word is converted into the same syllable (DEE), removing most phonetic information while retaining the stress and rhythm patterns of the original words and phrases.…”