Learning to Read Interacts with Children’s Spoken Language Fluency

Abstract

Until at least the end of adolescence, children articulate speech differently than adults. While this discrepancy is often attributed to the maturation of the speech motor system, we sought to demonstrate that the development of spoken language fluency is shaped by complex interactions across motor and cognitive domains. In this study, we specifically tested for a relationship between reading proficiency and coarticulatory organization, a fundamental correlate of spoken language fluency, used for both reading aloud and conversational speech. We conducted reading assessments and ultrasoundbased kinematic measurements of intersegmental coarticulation in a group of 32 German children. In German, a language which supports rather consistent grapheme-to-phoneme relationships, reading aloud uses similar phoneme to speech motor gesture correspondences as well as coarticulatory mechanisms as conversational speech. Using general additive modeling we found that better readers exhibited lower degrees of intersegmental coarticulation than poorer readers. This study therefore provides evidence that reading proficiency interacts with coarticulatory patterns in beginning readers. It suggests that in addition to maturational factors, interactions between speech motor ability and other co-developing skills must be considered to fully account for spoken language fluency.

One-to-One or One Too Many ? Linking Sound-to-Letter Mappings to Speech Sound Perception and Production in Early Readers

“…Another important contribution of this study is the link we observed between speech sound production and phonological decoding, a critical basis for reading skills. This is in line with recent findings by Popescu and Noiray (2021), who report less intersegmental co-articulation in pseudoword production in a group of more proficient German readers. Here, we expand on this finding by showing a relationship between better phonological decoding skills, suggesting also better reading skills, and faster preparation and initiation of speech sound production.…”

“…Moreover, this study and the two studies that also observed an association between reading-related and articulatory skills (Noiray, Popescu, et al, 2019;Popescu & Noiray, 2021) were conducted in orthographically transparent languages. Future research should examine whether the same effects are present in orthographically opaque languages.…”

“…In the speech production task, speech onset time (SOT; see Table 1) was used as a behavioral indicator of the time needed to prepare and initiate the oral response. Building on recent findings from Popescu and Noiray (2021) and in line with the literature showing that children with poor reading skills (e.g., children with dyslexia) are slower to articulate and produce syllables compared to their peers with no reading problems (Duranovic & Sehic, 2013;Fawcett & Nicolson, 2002), we set out to investigate if these reading-related effects-in addition to being present at the articulatory level-may also be seen at higher levels of speech production (i.e., the level of speech planning). We hypothesized that children with better decoding skills would also be overall faster at producing isolated speech sounds.…”

“…The hypothesis that speech sound production may, apart from obvious physical changes, also be linked to literacy acquisition is supported by recent evidence showing a relationship between articulatory maturation and literacy skills. Popescu and Noiray (2021) used the ultrasound tongue imaging technique to measure the degree of coarticulation between vowels and consonants (i.e., the intersegmental co-articulation degree). As several previous studies reported lesser degree of co-articulation in older as compared to younger speakers (Noiray et al, 2013;Noiray, Wieling, et al, 2019;Zharkova et al, 2011), this measure is commonly used to assess articulatory maturation (Noiray, Wieling, et al, 2019).…”

Language exposure predicts children’s phonetic patterning: Evidence from language shift

“…And then, even once typically-developing children shed these early phonological errors, they still don't master appropriate amounts of coarticulatory overlap until puberty (Zharkova, Hewlett, Hardcastle, & Lickley 2014). Until that time, children exhibit excessive intra-syllabic coarticulation in their speech, and are only able to distinguish between adjacent segments as their fine motor control develops, the lexicon grows, and phonological awareness increases (Barbier et al 2020, Noiray et al 2019, Popescu & Noiray 2021, Zharkova, Hewlett, & Hardcastle 2011. Thus, children exhibit protracted coarticulatory development until early adolescence when they have acquired both sufficient linguistic and speech-motor experience to approximate adult-like segmental overlap.…”