A cross‐sectional study of prosodic sensitivity and reading difficulties

Abstract

In this cross-sectional study, we explore the relationship between prosodic sensitivity (suprasegmental phonology) and phonological awareness (segmental phonology) and investigate whether a group of poor readers display significant suprasegmental phonological deficits in comparison to chronological age-matched controls and younger, reading age-matched controls. Phonological awareness assessments were administered along with a battery of prosodic sensitivity assessments drawn from recent literature. The results showed that poor readers were outperformed by their chronological age-matched counterparts on all measures of prosodic sensitivity. A significant main effect of group was found on the revised stress mispronunciations task and the stress assignment task from the prosodic assessment battery, the former of which remained even after controlling for individual differences in receptive vocabulary and measures of phonological awareness. Significant relationships were also found between measures of prosodic sensitivity and phonological awareness (especially phoneme awareness). These findings emphasise the importance of both segmental and suprasegmental phonological skills in children's reading development.

Habilidades fonológicas suprasegmentales y desarrollo lector en niños de educación primaria

“…Parece que la contribución de las habilidades prosó-dicas no sólo es importante en los momentos iniciales del aprendizaje de la lectura como apuntaban estudios previos (Calet et al, 2015;Defior, et al, 2012;Gutiérrez-Palma y Palma, 2007;Gutiérrez-Palma et al, 2009;Holliman, et al, 2008Holliman, et al, , 2010, sino que incluso en estadios avanzados de desarrollo lector es relevante. Los resultados asimismo confirman la evidenciada relación entre la CF y las medidas de habilidades lectoras (Anthony y Lonigan, 2004;Bradley y Bryant, 1983;Caravolas, et al, 2013;Share, 1995;Snowling y Hulme, 2005;Wagner y Torgesen, 1987).…”

“…Este resultado estaría de acuerdo con el modelo de Wood et al (2009) ya que los autores proponían una ruta directa desde las habilidades prosódicas hacia las habilidades lectoras. De este modo, las habilidades suprasegmentales podrían jugar un papel facilitador en la lectura de palabras, confirmando así el papel que tiene la prosodia en la adquisición lectora en español, al igual que ocurre en los estudios de habla inglesa (e.g., Holliman et al, 2010;Wood, 2006;Whalley y Hansen, 2006). Esto vendría a corroborar que la fonología suprasegmental puede ser un factor universal que interviene en la adquisición de la lectura, independiente de las características de la lengua o del tipo de ritmo lingüístico que tenga, ya que español e inglés tienen una estructura rítmica diferente (ritmo silábico vs. ritmo acentual).…”

“…Algunos autores han argumentado sobre la necesidad de integrar las diversas asociaciones encontradas entre habilidades prosódicas y la lectura en una medida multi-componente que distinga entre acento, entonación y ritmo (Holliman et al, 2013;Holliman, et al, 2014). Se observa que a nivel de palabra, la conciencia prosódica ha sido relacionada con la habilidad de lectura de palabras (Holliman, et al, 2008;Holliman, Wood, y Sheehy, 2010;Whalley y Hansen, 2006), la riqueza de vocabulario (Wood, 2006) y la lectura de palabras y pseudopalabras (Calet, Gutiérrez-Palma, Simpson, González-Trujillo, y Defior, 2015;Gutiérrez-Palma y Palma-Reyes, 2007), mientras que a nivel de frase se ha relacionado principalmente con la comprensión lectora (Whalley y Hansen, 2006).…”

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

“…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.…”

Learning to Read Spanish

“…Diversos estudios han corroborado las distintas conexiones entre la conciencia prosódica y las habilidades de lectura que se plantean en este modelo (Goodman, Libenson y Wade-Woolley, 2010;Holliman, et al, 2010;Holliman, Wood y Sheehy, 2012;Wade-Woolley, 2007). No obstante, los autores apuntan que las distintas conexiones propuestas podrían variar dependiendo de la edad, por lo que sugieren la realización de estudios longitudinales y más sistemáticos.…”