DOI: 10.25549/usctheses-c127-628097
title: A cross-sectional and longitudinal study of prosodic perception in typical and atypical reading development

description: This dissertation is a collection of three studies designed to explore the contribution of prosody to reading development. Each chapter represents a separate study. ❧ Chapter 2. Using a non-speech specific measure of prosody, rise time perception, Goswami and her colleagues have found that individuals with dyslexia perform significantly worse than non-impaired readers.  Studies have also found that children and adults with specific language impairment were impaired on these tasks.  Despite the high co-morbidity of these disorders, only one study has assessed rise time sensitivity in children with co-morbid reading and non-phonological language difficulties. This study further examined rise time sensitivity in children with both reading and non-phonological language difficulties. I compared performance on rise time perception tasks between 17 children with reading difficulties, 16 children with reading and non-phonological language difficulties, and 17 chronological age matched controls. There was a significant interaction between group and performance on auditory tasks. Further tests revealed that chronological age matched controls were significantly better on the rise time measures compared to both groups of children with reading difficulties.  Performance between the groups of children with reading difficulties did not significantly differ, indicating that additional non-phonological language difficulties were not associated with a more severe rise time perception deficit.  ❧ Chapter 3. Studies have begun to focus on what skills contribute to the development of phonological awareness, an important predictor of later reading attainment. One of these skills is the perception of prosody, which is the rhythm, tempo, and stress of a language. To examine whether prosodic perception contributes to phonological awareness prior to formal reading tuition, we assessed 49 children who had not yet learned how to read. Using confirmatory factor analysis, we found that measures of prosodic perception and phonological awareness loaded onto separate factors. Our regression analyses revealed that prosodic perception accounted for a significant amount of variance after partialing out definitional vocabulary, but not after accounting for receptive vocabulary. Based on the independence of prosodic perception from definitional vocabulary, we concluded that prosodic perception contributes to the development of phonological awareness indirectly through receptive vocabulary, by improving speech processing skills, but independently of semantic knowledge. Further studies should examine the role of prosody in children at-risk for later reading difficulties. ❧ Chapter 4. In order to reduce the prevalence and severity of reading difficulties, research has begun to focus on early predictive indicators of later reading problems, including prosody. Perception of the rhythm, tempo, and stress of a language has been linked to individual differences in older children and adults, but few studies have examined the role of prosody during the transition from pre-reader to reader. In the current study, we assessed 34 participants in preschool on prosodic perception, vocabulary, and phonological awareness and then ten months later in kindergarten on word reading, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. We found that prosodic perception was significantly associated with word reading, but that phonological awareness acted as the main mediator in that relationship. Vocabulary also partially mediated the link between prosodic perception and reading, but the mediation effect was weaker than that observed for phonological awareness. The lack of a direct pathway between prosodic perception and word reading in this study might be due to the lack of complex words on the reading measures. Additional studies should explicitly investigate the role of prosodic perception in the development of multisyllabic word reading.