The contribution of sensitivity to speech rhythm and non‐speech rhythm to early reading development

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.…”

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

“…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.…”

Reading Acquisition and Phonological Awareness: Beyond the Segmental Level

“…The results revealed that performance on the stress mispronunciation task was related to spelling scores, even after controlling for phonological awareness and vocabulary. Using similar mispronunciation tasks in 5-7 year-old children, sensitivity to speech rhythm was found to account for some amount of unique variance in word reading ability after controlling for age, vocabulary and phonological awareness (Holliman et al, 2008) as well as short-term memory and non-speech rhythm (Holliman et al, 2010a).…”