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The conscious awareness and underlying representation of syllabic stress in skilled adult readers and adults with developmental dyslexia
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Mundy, Ian R. (2011) The conscious awareness and underlying representation of syllabic stress in skilled adult readers and adults with developmental dyslexia. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b2665908~S1
Abstract
The relationship between phonemic awareness and literacy ability is well established
in the developmental and adult reading literatures. Recent research indicates that
awareness of the rhythmic patterns present in spoken language (i.e. prosody) may
also be an important predictor of reading ability. Researchers have demonstrated that
sensitivity to speech prosody can facilitate speech segmentation and the development
of phoneme awareness. Awareness of the rhythmic patterns in spoken words and
phrases is also known to play a direct role in phonological decoding, reading
comprehension and learning to use punctuation. These findings have the potential to
enhance our understanding of typical reading development and inform theories of
how poor phonological and auditory skills contribute to dyslexia. This research also
helps extend our knowledge of skilled and impaired reading to a wider range of
reading materials (e.g. multisyllabic words) and thus raises issues relevant to
cognitive models of visual word recognition.
A small number of studies have demonstrated that sensitivity to the prosodic patterns
in spoken language is reduced in children with dyslexia. However, there is currently
no published research investigating the prosodic processing skills of adults with
dyslexia. The precise nature of the prosodic processing deficit associated with
dyslexia is also unclear. These gaps in the literature are problematic because
phonological processing is multifaceted and the relationship between specific
phonological skills and reading ability may change over time.
This thesis presents four cross sectional studies in which adults with dyslexia were
compared with control participants matched for age and IQ on various tasks designed
to measure prosodic processing. The experiments also contrast the conscious
awareness of prosodic structure with the underlying representation of syllabic stress
assignment in the mental lexicon and the ability to acquire spelling-sound
correspondences for decoding stress assignment in multisyllabic words.
Participants with dyslexia showed reduced awareness of lexical and metrical prosody
and these skills were found to be significantly associated with, and predictive of,
phoneme awareness and phonological decoding ability (Experiments 1a and 2). In
contrast, adults with dyslexia showed normal patterns of stress based priming at
magnitudes similar to controls (Experiments 1b and 2). Similar, although somewhat
weaker results were also obtained when lexical stress was primed with abstract stress
templates rather than real-word stimuli (Experiment 3). Participants with dyslexia
also showed normal effects of spelling-stress congruency on lexical decision times
for disyllabic words (Experiment 4).
The overall pattern of results strongly suggests that the prosodic processing problems
associated with dyslexia in adulthood are limited to tasks requiring participants to
access and consciously reflect upon their knowledge of prosodic structure, or to
process information related to prosodic structure in an abstract way. In contrast, the
ability of adults with dyslexia to represent lexical stress assignment in the mental
lexicon, assemble novel prosodic representations, and learn correspondences
between lexical stress assignment and aspects of orthographic structure appears to be
intact. Encouragingly, this pattern of results is consistent with recent findings
reported in the domain of phonemic processing.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology L Education > LC Special aspects of education P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Psycholinguistics, Phonemics, Phonetics, Accents and accentuation, Literacy, Dyslexics, Language awareness | ||||
Official Date: | March 2011 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of Psychology | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Carroll, Julia M. | ||||
Extent: | xii, 207 leaves. | ||||
Language: | eng |
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