Abstract
Children with developmental dyslexia are characterized by phonological difficulties across languages. Classically, this ‘phonological deficit’ in dyslexia has been investigated with tasks using single‐syllable words. Recently, however, several studies have demonstrated difficulties in prosodic awareness in dyslexia. Potential prosodic effects in short‐term memory have not yet been investigated. Here we create a new instrument based on three‐syllable words that vary in stress patterns, to investigate whether prosodic similarity (the same prosodic pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables) exerts systematic effects on short‐term memory. We study participants with dyslexia and age‐matched and younger reading‐level‐matched typically developing controls. We find that all participants, including dyslexic participants, show prosodic similarity effects in short‐term memory. All participants exhibited better retention of words that differed in prosodic structure, although participants with dyslexia recalled fewer words accurately overall compared to age‐matched controls. Individual differences in prosodic memory were predicted by earlier vocabulary abilities, by earlier sensitivity to syllable stress and by earlier phonological awareness. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of prosodic similarity effects in short‐term memory. The implications of a prosodic similarity effect for theories of lexical representation and of dyslexia are discussed. © 2016 The Authors. Dyslexia published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Highlights
Structural characteristics of the phonological lexicon have been shown to affect short-term recall in both typically-developing children and children with developmental dyslexia
Our theoretical focus in the current paper is whether the prosodic impairments that we have identified in children with dyslexia will affect phonological memory in a serial recall task
All participants found the short-term recall of phonological information easier when the rhythmic stress templates of three different words were all different, such as strong-weak-weak (SWW), WSW, WWS. These prosodic similarity effects were found even though the items used in the prosodic memory task did not share any syllables, ensuring that phonological similarity depended on rhythmic stress patterns
Summary
Structural characteristics of the phonological lexicon have been shown to affect short-term recall in both typically-developing children and children with developmental dyslexia. They are poor at identifying the constituent sounds in words (phonological awareness tasks), they show impairments in phonological short-term memory tasks (e.g. digit span), and they are slow when asked to name familiar letters, object names, colours or digits as quickly as possible (rapid automatized naming tasks, RAN) Despite these persistent difficulties, classic effects of lexical structure in serial recall tasks such as the word length effect (Hulme & Tordoff, 1989), the phonological similarity effect (Holligan & Johnston, 1988) and the phonological neighbourhood density effect (Thomson et al, 2005), are all intact in children with dyslexia (unless tasks that exceed memory span are used, Johnston et al, 1987). Even though the capacity of phonological shortterm memory is impaired in dyslexia, when memory span in children with dyslexia is matched to that of younger children of similar reading level (RL control children), equivalent phonological similarity effects are found (Johnston et al, 1987; Holligan & Johnston, 1988)
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