Learning to Read Interacts with Children’s Spoken Language Fluency

ABSTRACT

Until at least the end of adolescence, children articulate speech differently than adults. While this discrepancy is often attributed to the maturation of the speech motor system, we sought to demonstrate that the development of spoken language fluency is shaped by complex interactions across motor and cognitive domains. In this study, we specifically tested for a relationship between reading proficiency and coarticulatory organization, a fundamental correlate of spoken language fluency, used for both reading aloud and conversational speech. We conducted reading assessments and ultrasound-based kinematic measurements of intersegmental coarticulation in a group of 32 German children. In German, a language which supports rather consistent grapheme-to-phoneme relationships, reading aloud uses similar phoneme to speech motor gesture correspondences as well as coarticulatory mechanisms as conversational speech. Using general additive modeling we found that better readers exhibited lower degrees of intersegmental coarticulation than poorer readers. This study therefore provides evidence that reading proficiency interacts with coarticulatory patterns in beginning readers. It suggests that in addition to maturational factors, interactions between speech motor ability and other co-developing skills must be considered to fully account for spoken language fluency.

Acknowledgments

We thank students at LOLA lab in Potsdam for their valuable assistance in the recording and processing of the data collected. We are also grateful to Carol Fowler for stimulating discussion, and to the two anonymous scholars and editor who have provided very useful feedback on previous versions of this manuscript. Special thanks to all the children (and their parents) who participated in the study.

Data availability

If accepted for publication to Language Learning and Development, the dataset used for this article can be made publicly available on an online platform.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was generously supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) grant N° 255676067 and 1098 and PredictAble (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014, N° 641858); .