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Abstract
Recent research indicates that awareness of the rhythmic patterns present in spoken language (i.e., prosody) may be an important and relatively overlooked predictor of reading ability. Two studies investigated the prosodic processing abilities of skilled adult readers and adults with developmental dyslexia. Participants with dyslexia showed reduced awareness of lexical and metrical stress and these skills were found to be significantly associated with, and predictive of, phonological decoding ability. In contrast, the same individuals showed normal patterns of stress based priming at magnitudes similar to controls. These results—suggesting reduced phonological awareness in the context of intact phonological representations—are consistent with recent findings reported in the domain of phonemic processing. Implications for the phonological deficit theory of dyslexia are discussed.
Acknowledgments
This research forms part of the first author's doctoral thesis and was supported by a postgraduate research fellowship awarded by the University of Warwick. The authors would like to thank Rachel Carter for voicing the auditory stimuli, Steve Cumberland for his assistance with sound recording, and all those who kindly agreed to take part in the research.
Notes
1To our knowledge the only existing data addressing the links between prosodic skills and reading impairment in adulthood are unpublished findings involving adults with self-reported histories of reading problems (Kitzen, Citation2001).
2Subgroup analyses of severely impaired readers were not conducted in Experiment 2. Given the outcome of such analyses in Experiment 1, there was no reason to suspect that they would produce a different pattern of results.