Exploring the relationship between prosodic sensitivity and emergent literacy in a sample of pre-readers: A one-year longitudinal study.

A growing literature has demonstrated that prosodic sensitivity (sensitivity to the rhythmic patterning of speech) is related to reading development; however, research investigating the relationship between prosodic sensitivity and reading development in the period prior to reading instruction is sparse. Moreover, few measures of prosodic sensitivity are suitable for children of this age and there is a paucity of longitudinal research in this area. In this study, four- to 5-year-old English-speaking children
(N = 101) from three Primary Schools in the West Midlands, UK who were identified as being pre-readers completed a new test of prosodic sensitivity and were also assessed for their non-verbal IQ, vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness at Time 1 (concurrently). At Time 2 (one year later) children (N = 93) were reassessed on these measures (not reported here) and also completed a word reading and spelling assessment. Bivariate correlation analyses revealed that children’s prosodic sensitivity was significantly related to their vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness (concurrently) and their word reading and spelling (one year later). However, in a series of multiple regression analyses, the only variable found to make a significant unique contribution to word reading and spelling one year later was phonological awareness. These preliminary findings indicate that prosodic sensitivity is unable to ‘directly’ predict early reading development beyond its association with other emergent literacy skills (e.g., phonological awareness).