Contributions of prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness to word level reading : a perceptual task development study /

Abstract

Morphological awareness and prosodic sensitivity are metalinguistic skills, which have been shown to be significant predictors of word level reading in children (Clin, Wade-Woolley, Heggie, 2009; Jarmulowizc, Tarran, & Hay, 2007). The current studies first validated an experimental auditory lexical decision task for prosodic sensitivity to stress shifting in words and pseudowords; secondly, they validated a stress perception task for words; and third, they validated a morphological awareness task. The relationship between prosodic sensitivity, morphological awareness, and reading tasks was also analyzed. Results of the first study indicated that the experimental prosodic sensitivity task accounted for 9% of the variance in word level reading outcomes and that it was significant for real words but not pseudowords. The contribution of prosodic sensitivity to stress shifts in real words was unique when controlling for age, vocabulary, and morphological awareness. This study also found that morphological awareness predicted an additional 4% of the variance in word reading outcomes.

The results of the second study found that the prosodic sensitivity to accurate stress and morphological awareness were not significant predictors in word or passage level outcomes. Although both metalinguistic skills were not significant predictors when individually predicting unique contributions in word level outcomes, they were found to be significant components in a metalinguistic factor through factor analysis. This metalinguistic factor was found to significantly predict 5% of the comprehension outcomes for children in 3, 4, and 5 grades. These findings strengthen the notion that word storage is a highly dependent on integration and interrelatedness in the processing of linguistic information.