Prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness in children’s reading

Lexical prosodic representation and access in Japanese children with developmental dyslexia

Recent research indicates that awareness of the prosodic information present in spoken language could be an important factor for literacy development, and that adults with developmental dyslexia show impaired awareness of lexical prosodic information, while the phonological representations remain intact. We investigated lexical prosodic representation and awareness in Japanese children with and without developmental dyslexia. Lexical prosodic representation was investigated using a cross-modal fragment priming task, and awareness was examined using a fragment identification task. The task was modified for children by selecting words with higher familiarity and fewer trials. As a result, the same pattern of prosodic priming effects was observed between groups; lexical decision time was faster in the prosodic congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. In addition, accuracy and reaction time did not show group differences in the fragment identification task. Relationship between prosody and literacy development may differ between languages but the sample size were small in both groups. Further investigation with larger sample size is required.

Effects of morphological intervention on multiple aspects of academic vocabulary knowledge

Despite the positive role of English morphology in word learning, the existing evidence is mainly on young L1 native speakers' receptive word gains. This intervention study, which employed a pretest-posttest control-experimental group design, was conducted to explore the effects of morphological training on multiple aspects of academic vocabulary learning. Participants (N = 50) were college EFL learners from southern China, who received either traditional vocabulary instruction or morphological training for 6 weeks. The 2 × 2 ANOVA analysis revealed significant instructional effects on receptive academic vocabulary learning, but not for productive academic word knowledge. Results are discussed in light of the important connection between morphology and receptive word learning, and the nature of productive vocabulary acquisition.

Effects of Affix Type and Base Word Transparency on Students' Performance on Different Morphological Awareness Measures

PURPOSE

We examined whether affix type and base word transparency explained variation in third- through sixth-grade students' performance on a number of morphological awareness tasks.

METHOD

Third- through sixth-grade students (n > 500 at each grade) completed morphological awareness tasks from the Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and Spelling, which represent the ways individuals may use their morphological awareness to support reading and spelling. Explanatory item response models were used to understand the role of affix type and base word transparency on students' performance on six morphological awareness tasks.

RESULTS

For all grades, 73%-83% of variance in students' performance was due to differences across individual items. Furthermore, when task effects, affix type, and base word transparency were included simultaneously in the model, affix type was not a significant predictor; there was a significant effect of base word transparency and task. Specifically, the probability of a correct response was greater on task items in which inflected or derived words were transparent with their base word (e.g., friend > friendly) compared to items in which there was a shift in both the phonological and orthographic aspects of the base word (e.g., attend > attention).

CONCLUSIONS

These findings emphasize the importance of considering base word transparency when assessing students' morphological awareness skills with less emphasis on affix type, at least for third- through sixth-grade students. Our results also point to the importance of administering a variety of morphological awareness tasks to fully capture an individual's morphological awareness skills. Collectively, researchers and practitioners should ensure assessment items on multiple measures of morphological awareness vary in their base word transparency to potentially capture a range of student performances.

Korean-english Bilingual Children's Stress Cue Sensitivity and its Relationship with Reading in English

Lexical stress plays a critical role in multisyllabic word reading in English. However, assignment of English lexical stress, which is neither fixed nor marked in writing, can pose significant challenges for English learners and has not been well-understood. The present study aims to fill the research gap by studying sensitivity to lexical stress cues and its contribution to their word reading performance among young English-language learners whose first language is Korean. The fundamental differences in prosodic systems between Korean and English provide theoretical significance of studying how bilingual children having no lexical stress in their first language process English lexical stress. This study focuses on two major cues to English lexical stress: morphological and orthographic cues. Findings revealed that the participants are sensitive to the two stress cues, with better performance with orthographic cues to stress assignment. However, no statistically significant correlations were found among variables on stress cue sensitivity with those on reading.

Morphological Awareness Performance Profiles of First- Through Sixth-Grade Students

PURPOSE

We examined whether diverse profiles of strengths and weaknesses would emerge when assessing different aspects of morphological awareness in first- through sixth-grade students using a recently developed standardized test, the Morphological Awareness Test for Reading and Spelling (MATRS; Apel et al., 2021).

METHOD

Four thousand fifty-nine first- through sixth-grade students completed the eight morphological awareness tasks of the MATRS. The eight tasks represent the multiple ways that morphological awareness impacts both spoken and written language skills for the English language. Exploratory finite mixture models estimated the number of latent subgroups that best reflected heterogeneity in task-level performance by grade level. Specific profiles were chosen that demonstrated strong reliability and included a set of tasks that were consistent between first- and second-grade students and between third- and sixth-grade students.

RESULTS

Different performance profiles emerged when the students completed multiple morphological awareness tasks. At each of the six grades (first through sixth), clusters of students performed differentially on specific tasks.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings demonstrate that students can differ in patterns of strength and weaknesses of their morphological awareness given a range of tasks that assess different aspects of morphological awareness. The clinical implications of these findings suggest that by identifying students struggling in specific areas of morphological awareness, clinicians can develop and implement specific prescriptive instructional plans.

Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis ("TOPsy"): Psychometric Validation of a Brief Scalable Test of Lexical Stress Perception

Prosody perception is fundamental to spoken language communication as it supports comprehension, pragmatics, morphosyntactic parsing of speech streams, and phonological awareness. A particular aspect of prosody: perceptual sensitivity to speech rhythm patterns in words (i.e., lexical stress sensitivity), is also a robust predictor of reading skills, though it has received much less attention than phonological awareness in the literature. Given the importance of prosody and reading in educational outcomes, reliable and valid tools are needed to conduct large-scale health and genetic investigations of individual differences in prosody, as groundwork for investigating the biological underpinnings of the relationship between prosody and reading. Motivated by this need, we present the Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis ("TOPsy") and highlight its merits as a phenotyping tool to measure lexical stress sensitivity in as little as 10 min, in scalable internet-based cohorts. In this 28-item speech rhythm perception test [modeled after the stress identification test from Wade-Woolley (2016)], participants listen to multi-syllabic spoken words and are asked to identify lexical stress patterns. Psychometric analyses in a large internet-based sample shows excellent reliability, and predictive validity for self-reported difficulties with speech-language, reading, and musical beat synchronization. Further, items loaded onto two distinct factors corresponding to initially stressed vs. non-initially stressed words. These results are consistent with previous reports that speech rhythm perception abilities correlate with musical rhythm sensitivity and speech-language/reading skills, and are implicated in reading disorders (e.g., dyslexia). We conclude that TOPsy can serve as a useful tool for studying prosodic perception at large scales in a variety of different settings, and importantly can act as a validated brief phenotype for future investigations of the genetic architecture of prosodic perception, and its relationship to educational outcomes.

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings.  These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects and failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Duration) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 59 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

The Multidimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP)

Prosody can be defined as the rhythm and intonation patterns spanning words, phrases and sentences. Accurate perception of prosody is an important component of many aspects of language processing, such as parsing grammatical structures, recognizing words, and determining where emphasis may be placed. Prosody perception is important for language acquisition and can be impaired in language-related developmental disorders. However, existing assessments of prosodic perception suffer from some shortcomings.  These include being unsuitable for use with typically developing adults due to ceiling effects and failing to allow the investigator to distinguish the unique contributions of individual acoustic features such as pitch and temporal cues. Here we present the Multi-Dimensional Battery of Prosody Perception (MBOPP), a novel tool for the assessment of prosody perception. It consists of two subtests: Linguistic Focus, which measures the ability to hear emphasis or sentential stress, and Phrase Boundaries, which measures the ability to hear where in a compound sentence one phrase ends, and another begins. Perception of individual acoustic dimensions (Pitch and Duration) can be examined separately, and test difficulty can be precisely calibrated by the experimenter because stimuli were created using a continuous voice morph space. We present validation analyses from a sample of 59 individuals and discuss how the battery might be deployed to examine perception of prosody in various populations.

Lexique-Infra: grapheme-phoneme, phoneme-grapheme regularity, consistency, and other sublexical statistics for 137,717 polysyllabic French words

Psycholinguistic research has shown that both the regularity and consistency of the grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme correspondences impact word processing. Lexique-Infra is a new database providing infra-lexical statistics for 137,717 French words. The frequencies of the grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme correspondences as well as other indicators (consistency, regularity, letter frequencies, bigrams, trigrams, phonemes, biphones, and syllables, etc.) are proposed and have been computed from the corpus of subtitles in Lexique 3.83. The aim of this new database is to propose numerous infra-lexical variables based on adult frequencies for a large number of words.

Stress Judgment and Production in English Derivation, and Word Reading in Adult Mandarin-Speaking English Learners

For monolingual English-speaking children, judgment and production of stress in derived words, including words with phonologically neutral (e.g., -ness) and non-neutral suffixes (e.g., -ity), is important to both academic vocabulary growth and to word reading. For Mandarin-speaking adult English learners (AELs) the challenge of learning the English stress system might be complicated by cross-linguistic differences in prosodic function and features. As Mandarin-speakers become more proficient in English, patterns similar to those seen in monolingual children could emerge in which awareness and use of stress and suffix cues benefit word reading. A correlational design was used to examine the contributions of English stress in derivation with neutral and non-neutral suffixes to English word and nonword reading. Stress judgment in non-neutral derivation predicted word reading after controlling for working memory and English vocabulary; whereas stress production in neutral derivation contributed to word reading and pseudoword decoding, independent of working memory and English vocabulary. Although AELs could use stress and suffix cues for word reading, AELs were different from native English speakers in awareness of non-neutral suffix cues conditioning lexical stress placement. AELs may need to rely on lexical storage of primary stress in derivations with non-neutral suffixes.

The relationship between children's sensitivity to dominant and non-dominant patterns of lexical stress and reading accuracy

This study reports on a new task for assessing children's sensitivity to lexical stress for words with different stress patterns and demonstrates that this task is useful in examining predictors of reading accuracy during the elementary years. In English, polysyllabic words beginning with a strong syllable exhibit the most common or dominant pattern of lexical stress (e.g., "coconut"), whereas polysyllabic words beginning with a weak syllable exhibit a less common non-dominant pattern (e.g., "banana"). The new Aliens Talking Underwater task assesses children's ability to match low-pass filtered recordings of words to pictures of objects. Via filtering, phonetic detail is removed but prosodic contour information relating to lexical stress is retained. In a series of two-alternative forced choice trials, participants see a picture and are asked to choose which of two filtered recordings matches the name of that picture; one recording exhibits the correct lexical stress of the target word, and the other recording reverses the pattern of stress over the initial two syllables of the target word rendering it incorrect. Target words exhibit either dominant stress or non-dominant stress. Analysis of data collected from 192 typically developing children aged 5 to 12years revealed that sensitivity to non dominant lexical stress was a significant predictor of reading accuracy even when age and phonological awareness were taken into account. A total of 76.3% of variance in children's reading accuracy was explained by these variables.

Modeling Polymorphemic Word Recognition: Exploring Differences Among Children With Early-Emerging and Late-Emerging Word Reading Difficulty

Comprehensive models of derived polymorphemic word recognition skill in developing readers, with an emphasis on children with reading difficulty (RD), have not been developed. The purpose of the present study was to model individual differences in polymorphemic word recognition ability at the item level among 5th-grade children (N = 173) oversampled for children with RD using item-response crossed random-effects models. We distinguish between two subtypes of RD children with word recognition problems, those with early-emerging RD and late-emerging RD. An extensive set of predictors representing item-specific knowledge, child-level characteristics, and word-level characteristics were used to predict item-level variance in polymorphemic word recognition. Results indicate that item-specific root word recognition and word familiarity; child-level RD status, morphological awareness, and orthographic choice; word-level frequency and root word family size; and the interactions between morphological awareness and RD status and root word recognition and root transparency predicted individual differences in polymorphemic word recognition item performance. Results are interpreted within a multisource individual difference model of polymorphemic word recognition skill spanning item-specific, child-level, and word-level knowledge.

Investigating morphological awareness and the processing of transparent and opaque words in adults with low literacy skills and in skilled readers

For adults with low literacy skills, the role of phonology in reading has been fairly well researched, but less is known about the role of morphology in reading. We investigated the contribution of morphological awareness to word reading and reading comprehension and found that for adults with low literacy skills and skilled readers, morphological awareness explained unique variance in word reading and reading comprehension. In addition, we investigated the effects of orthographic and phonological opacity in morphological processing. Results indicated that adults with low literacy skills were more impaired than skilled readers on items containing phonological changes but were spared on items involving orthographic changes. These results are consistent with previous findings of adults with low literacy skills reliance on orthographic codes. Educational implications are discussed.

Impaired stress awareness in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia

The role of segmental phonology in developmental dyslexia (DD) is well established (e.g., deficit in phonological awareness), but the role of suprasegmental phonology (prosody) has been less widely investigated. Stress is one of the main prosodic features and refers to the relative prominence of syllables (strong/weak) within a word. The aim of the present study is to examine stress awareness in children with dyslexia and the possible mediation of phonemic awareness on suprasegmental phonological skills. Thirty-one Spanish children with DD and 31 chronological age-control children participated. Two stress awareness tasks were administrated, one with words and another with pseudowords. Results show that the children with dyslexia performed more poorly on both tasks than control children. The pattern of results in accuracy and reaction time suggest that, while children without difficulties use different strategies depending on the type of item, the children with dyslexia employ the same strategy to resolve the two tasks without any benefit of lexical knowledge about stress. Even so, this strategy did not work so efficiently as it did in the control group, which led the group with dyslexia to make a greater number of mistakes. It was also found that, when phonemic awareness was entered as a covariate, accuracy differences disappeared, but only in the word stress task. However, when lexical knowledge was not necessary (as in the pseudoword stress task) differences still remained statistically significant. Implications on the importance of suprasegmental processing in reading acquisition disabilities are discussed.

Prosodic awareness skills and literacy acquisition in Spanish

There has been very little research in Spanish on the potential role of prosodic skills in reading and spelling acquisition, which is the subject of the present study. A total of 85 children in 5th year of Primary Education (mean age 10 years and 9 months) performed tests assessing memory, stress awareness, phonological awareness, reading and spelling. In written language tests, errors were classified as phonological (grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules) or stress-related (placement of the stress mark). Regression analyses showed that, once memory and phonological awareness were controlled, stress awareness partially explained reading and spelling performance as well as error type; however, differences were found between reading and spelling errors. These results show a relationship between prosodic skills--namely stress sensitivity--and the acquisition of reading and spelling skills that seems to be independent of phonological awareness skills.

Dutch elementary school children's attribution of meaning to written pseudowords

Grade two through six elementary school Dutch children were asked to perform a lexical decision task including 90 pseudowords constructed by changing one or two letters in a Dutch word. Subsequently, the children were asked about the meaning of pseudowords they had not crossed out and that they, apparently, had considered to be words. Multiple regression analyses on the lexical decision task showed that the older children were more hindered by the morphemic structure of a pseudoword than by its orthographic neighbors. The younger children, in contrast, were less hindered by the morphemic structure of a pseudoword and more hindered by its orthographic neighbors. Word length was a (small) predictor only for grade 6. Moreover, the answers of the children reflected that in their construction of meanings for the pseudowords they were hindered both by the morphemic structure and by the orthographic neighbors of the pseudowords.