Beginning to disentangle the prosody-literacy relationship: a multi-component measure of prosodic sensitivity

Holliman, AJ, Williams, GJ ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7689-1231, Mundy, IR, Wood, C ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1492-6501, Hart, L and Waldron, S, 2014. Beginning to disentangle the prosody-literacy relationship: a multi-component measure of prosodic sensitivity. Reading and Writing: an Interdisciplinary Journal, 27 (2), pp. 255-266. ISSN 0922-4777

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Abstract

A growing number of studies now suggest that sensitivity to the rhythmic patterning of speech (prosody) is implicated in successful reading acquisition. However, recent evidence suggests that prosody is not a unitary construct and that the different components of prosody (stress, intonation, and timing) operating at different linguistic levels (word, phrase, and sentence) may be related to reading development in different ways. Sixty-two five- to seven-year-old English-speaking children completed a newly developed, multi-component measure designed to assess several different aspects of prosodic sensitivity in a single, easily-administered task. The new measure was found to be sensitive to individual differences in prosodic sensitivity and participants’ overall scores were significantly correlated with measures of vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonological decoding, text reading accuracy, and reading comprehension. An exploratory factor analysis suggested that the multi-component measure of prosodic sensitivity distinguished between the processing of stress, intonation, and timing. The task also distinguished between word-level and sentence-level sensitivity to stress information. These findings add to the growing literature demonstrating a relationship between prosodic sensitivity and reading and represent a first step towards disentangling prosody and developing a more sophisticated understanding of its role in early reading development.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Reading and Writing: an Interdisciplinary Journal
Creators:	Holliman, A.J., Williams, G.J., Mundy, I.R., Wood, C., Hart, L. and Waldron, S.
Publisher:	Springer
Place of Publication:	The Netherlands
Date:	February 2014
Volume:	27
Number:	2
ISSN:	0922-4777
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1007/s11145-013-9443-6 DOI 9443 Publisher Item Identifier
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	EPrints Services
Date Added:	09 Oct 2015 11:14
Last Modified:	26 Jul 2017 13:17
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/24820

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