The role of prosodic sensitivity in children’s reading development

By Karen M. Whalley, Julie Hansen. 2006

267 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 word-level 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 an 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.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44d4386c805d10a398c1a0aa412c5d1e3379ffc7

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Citations in the corpus

Amplitude envelope perception, phonology and prosodic sensitivity in children with developmental dyslexia (2010, unknown): “Two novel DeeDee tasks, modelled on Kitzen (2001) and Whalley and Hansen (2006), were designed to measure prosodic sensitivity, one of which (the Famous Names task) preserved metrical or phrase-level prosodic structure.”
Reading Fluency: More Than Automaticity? More Than a Concern for the Primary Grades? (2009, unknown): “Recent studies have made a case for a causal relationship between prosody and reading comprehension among third- and fourth-grade readers (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006; Whalley & Hansen, 2006).”
Fitting derivational morphophonology into a developmental model of reading (2008, background): “Recent research suggests that sensitivity to and facility with prosody, including word stress, is related to reading independent of traditional measures of segmental phoneme awareness ( Whalley & Hansen, 2006; Wood, 2006).”
Auditory processing interventions and developmental dyslexia: a comparison of phonemic and rhythmic approaches (2013, methodology): “The second activity, the DeeDee task, was adapted from Whalley and Hansen (2006) and used a reiterative speech technique (following Kitzen, 2001; cf. Whalley & Hansen, 2006; see also Goswami, Gerson, & Astruc, 2010).”
Does speech rhythm sensitivity predict children's reading ability 1 year later?. (2007, unknown): “…variance in reading comprehension after controlling for age, vocabulary, and phonological awareness, the results were in the expected direction in line with the literature (Kitzen, 2001; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Whalley & Hansen, 2006) and did approach significance ( p .057).”
Rise time perception and detection of syllable stress in adults with developmental dyslexia (2011, methodology): “Goswami et al. (2009) developed two DeeDee tasks suitable for children with dyslexia, which avoided reading demands (see also Whalley & Hansen, 2006).”
Rhythm and reading development in school-age children: a longitudinal study (2007, background): “One notable exception is the study by Whalley and Hansen (2006) , which found significant relationships between word-level rhythm and decoding, and between sentence-level rhythm and reading comprehension.”