Factors affecting how children hear words and their relation to reading ability

Abstract

Sensitivity to lexical stress has received attention recently as a predictor of reading skill. Six experiments explored the relationship between the reader's ability to process stress in spoken disyllabic nouns and verbs. In Experiments 1 and 2, adults and children identified disyllabic nouns and verbs, each involving trochaic and iambic instances, in "yes/no" and "go/nogo" auditory lexical decision tasks. The results showed that they processed lexical stress in the same manner, across both tasks, except children were slower. In Experiment 3, when children were presented with only iambic verbs and trochaic nouns in a verb/noun categorization task, poor readers were faster than good readers. Whereas Experiments 1 to 3 involved the presentation of a single spoken word on each trial, Experiments 4 to 6 all involved the presentation of spoken word pairs differing only in terms of stress (iambic verbs and trochaic nouns; e.g., reWARD and REward). Experiment 4 required children to decide whether the noun (or verb on 50% of trials) was first or last in the pair. Good and poor readers both showed no difference in response latencies, but did better at categorising iambic items. However, in Experiment 5, only good readers showed differences between identity (same) and contrastive (different) items in a same/different task. In Experiment 6, poor readers attended more to suprasegmentals, whereas good readers appeared to process the items at the segmental level in auditory priming lexical decision. Overall, the results showed that poor readers appear to attend more to acoustic/phonetic information in spoken word recognition, whereas the good readers attend to segmental information at the lexical level in spoken word recognition.