Speech prosody and developmental dyslexia: Reduced phonological awareness in the context of intact phonological representations

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.