The Effect of Word Accent Production on Reading Performance in Japanese Young Children

Abstract

Various studies have shown that dyslexics have difficulty in the perception and production of suprasegmental aspects. Word accent is considered to be a part of suprasegmental phonology. It is reported that both the children with a familial risk of dyslexia and those diagnosed with dyslexia showed more difficulty with word stress production in Dutch. In addition, the characteristics of dyslexia have been said to be similar to those in early reading. As a result, it is expected that children in early stages of reading would also have difficulty in word accent production. However, there have been few studies on the effect of word accent production on reading performance in Japanese, a language with a pitch accent. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether Japanese children with poor reading skills would show more difficulty with the production of word accent than those with proficient reading skills. The participants were 49 children from the ages of 5;0 to 6;7. The stimuli were nonfamiliar threesyllable words. A reading task and a word accent production task were used. In the reading task, children were asked to read each word as fast as possible. In the word accent production task, identical stimulus words were presented with three types of accent patterns: nonaccented, firstsyllable accented, and second-syllable accented. The participants were required to repeat them aloud. The results were as follows: In the reading task, the participants were divided into two groups; the letter-by-letter group and the fluent group. In the word accent production task, the mean number of words repeated correctly in the letter-by-letter group was lower than that of the fluent group for all types of accent patterns. In addition, a significant difference was observed between not only the nonaccented words and the first-syllable accented words, but also between the firstsyllable accented and the second-syllable accented for the letter-by-letter group. Meanwhile, for the fluent group, no significant difference was observed between the nonaccented and first-syllable accented words. These results suggest that the letter-by-letter group experience more difficulty with word accent production and are more strongly affected by the accent patterns than the fluent group.