Copyright © 2011 UKLA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Journal of Research in Reading, ISSN 0141-0423 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9817.2011.01507.xVolume 00, Issue 00, 2011, pp 1–19

The relationship between prosodic perception, phonological awareness and vocabulary in emergent literacy

Rachel L. Beattie and Franklin R. Manis

Department of Psychology, College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences,

University of Southern California, USA

Studies have begun to focus on what skills contribute to the development of phono-

logical awareness, an important predictor of reading attainment. One of these skills

is the perception of prosody, which is the rhythm, tempo and stress of a language. To

examine whether prosodic perception contributes to phonological awareness prior to

reading tuition, we assessed 49 prereader s. Using confi rmatory factor analysis, we

found that measures of prosodic perception and phonological awareness loaded onto

separate factors. Our regression analyses revealed that prosodic perception accounted

for signifi cant variance after partiallin g out defi nitional vocabulary and memory for

digits, but not after accounting for receptive vocabulary. Based on the independence

of prosodic perception from defi nitional vocabulary, we concluded that prosodic per-

ception contributes to the development of phonological awareness indirectly through

receptive vocabulary, by improving speech-processing skills, but independently of

semantic knowledge. Further studies should examine the role of prosody in children at

risk of later reading diffi culties.

Research on both normal and atypical reading acquisition has primarily focused on the

contributions of vocabulary and segmental phonological awareness, particularly rhymes

and phonemes (Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2002). More recently,

studies of emergent literacy have begun to focus on awareness of another aspect of speech:

prosody, which is the rhythm, tempo and stress of a language (Whalley & Hansen, 2006).

Lindfi eld, Wingfi eld and Goodglass (1999) proposed that prosodic structure provides a

template that facilitates the access of lexical representations in spoken word recognition,

especially for homographs (e.g., a desert vs to desert). For visual word recognition, it has

been proposed that skilled readers activate elaborated phonological representations, which

contain prosodic information (Ashby & Cl ifton, 2005; Fodor, 1998).

Many studies have examined the direct link between prosody and reading in older

children and adults (Kitzen, 2001; Maddox & Conners, 2009; Wood & Terrell, 1998);

however, only a few studies have explored the role of prosody in emergent literacy and

how prosody contributes to the other skills necessary for reading, including phonological

awareness and vocabulary (Corriveau, Goswami & Thomson, 2010; Holliman, Wood &

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Sheehy, 2010a, 2010b; Wood, 2006). Due to the emphasis on early diagnosis and inter-

ventions for children at risk of developing reading problems, it is crucial to determine the

relationship between prosody, phonological awareness and vocabulary for children just

learning how to read.

Vocabulary and phonological awareness

For the purposes of this study, we narrowly confi ned our view of emergent literacy to

the child’s developing receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness and

prosodic perception. Phonological awareness refers to the ability to perceive, discrimi-

nate and manipulate syllables, rhymes and phonemes. In the literature, studies have

found a strong, consistent link between early phonological awareness and later read-

ing development, but one that is most likely bidirectional (Bryant, MacLean, Bradley

& Crossland, 1990; Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Wagner, To rgesen & Rashotte, 1994;

Wagner et al., 1997). Studies have also found a link between early oral language skills

and later reading attainment (Ouellette, 2006; Scarborough, 2005; Sénéchal, Ouelette

& Rodney, 2006).

Although some studies have found a direct link between vocabulary and reading (Catts,

Fey, Tomblin & Zhang 2002; Storch & Whitehurst, 2002), there is also evidence for

an indirect pathway in which vocabulary growth contributes to reading by facilitating

the development of phonological awareness (Burgess & Lonigan, 1998; Chaney, 1992;

Lonigan, Burgess, Anthony & Barker, 1998 ; Metsala, 1999; Walley, Metsala & Garlock,

2003). Cross-sectional studies of emergent literacy have found that phonological awareness

and vocabulary are positively correlated (Carroll, Snowling, Hulme & Stevenson, 2003).

Moreover, longitudinal studies indicate that performance on receptive and expressive

vocabulary tasks predicts later phonological awareness (Sénéchal et al., 2006; Silvén,

Niemi & Voeten, 2002).

Theoretically, it has been proposed that the growth of vocabulary, often measured with

receptive tasks, requires the long-term storage of sound patterns or phonology of words

(Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer, 1999). Without a suffi ciently large vocabulary, young children

have little need to represent words like older children and adults. Instead, infants and tod-

dlers are thought to have largely undifferentiated lexical representations based on overall

acoustic shape (Jusczyk, 1986; Hallé & Boysson-Bardies, 1996), which makes them insen-

sitive to small changes in the word’s sound segments (e.g., cut vs cat). Thus, the acquisi-

tion of a larger vocabulary leads to further development of phonological awareness, which

facilitates reading development.

Furthermore, depth of vocabulary knowledge, usually assessed with expressive

tasks, involves both the further development of phonological representations as well as

semantic knowledge (Ouellette, 2006). Unlike breadth of vocabulary, depth requires the

child to completely understand the word’s meaning. Relative to receptive vocabulary,

a stronger relationship has been observed between tasks that require oral defi nitions and reading (Scarborough, 1998; Roth, Speece & Cooper, 2002; Wise, Sevcik, Morris,

Lovett & Wolf, 2007). Moreover, Wise et al. (2007) found that receptive vocabulary had

a stronger link to phonological awareness relative to a measure of vocabulary depth for

second graders. They posited that the defi nitional task required higher-order language

skills whereas the receptive vocabulary task was more refl ective of the quality of the

underlying phonological representation. In order to better understand the different roles

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Copyright © 2011 UKLA

of vocabulary in older children, studies should use measures that assess both breadth and

depth when studying prereaders.

Prosody and the development of phonological awareness

In addition to vocabulary and phonological awareness, emergent literacy researchers

have begun focusing on the role of prosody in reading acquisition. A direct link

between reading profi ciency and prosody has been observed in older children and adults

(Goswami et al., 2002; Kitzen, 2001; Whalley & Hansen, 2006); however, other studies

have found that prosody facilitates reading indirectly through phonological awareness

(Goodman, Libenson & Wade-Woolley, 2010; Maddox & Conners, 2009). Evidence for

the direct and indirect pathways have focused on individuals who can read, yet very

few studies have examined prosodic perception in children who have not yet undergone

formal reading tuition. By using a prereading sample, we can explore the indirect

pathways from prosody to reading acquisition by examining the relationship between

prosody and phonological awareness.

Wood, Wade-Woolley and Holliman (2009) identifi ed two possible ways in which pro-

sodic perception could facilitate phonological awareness: (1) through rhyme awareness and

(2) through phoneme awareness. Both of these pathways begin with newborns’ heightened

perception of prosody (Christiansen & Dale, 2001; Fernald et al., 1989), referred to as a

periodicity bias. Newborns can differentiate between languages based on differences in

prosodic structure (Mehler et al., 198 8; Nazzi, Bertoncini & Mehler, 1998). The ability to

perceive differences in prosody allows infants to recognise reoccurring patterns in speech,

such as the predominant strong–weak stress patter n in English (Cutler & Carter, 1987).

English-learning infants’ recognition of this prosodic pattern allows them to reliably link

stressed syllables to word onsets and to segment and represent individual words from the

speech stream (Curtin, 2009; Curtin, Mintz & Christiansen, 2005; Cutler & Norris, 1988;

Vihman, Nakai, DePaolis & Hallé, 2004).

Although the ability to perceive, segment and represent speech is fundamental for

the development of more specifi c oral language skills, Wood et al. (2009) posited that

prosody may contribute to the development of rhyme and phoneme awareness in slightly

different ways. The rhyme awareness trajectory has been explored primarily using a non-

speech-specifi c task isolating an acoustic correlate of prosody: rise time, which refers

to the rate of change of the amplitude envelope at the onset. An increase in the mag-

nitude of a syllable’s intensity, or amplitude, is an important cue in the perception of a

stressed syllable (Greenberg, 1999) and in particular, vowels in stressed syllables have

faster rates of change in amplitude compared to vowels in unstressed syllables (Scott,

1998). Althou gh rise time is a basic, abstracted prosodic cue, performance on rise time

perception tasks has been strongly linked to more language-specifi c prosodic sensitivity

tasks (Goswami, Gerson & Astruc, 2009; Huss, Verney, Fosker, Mead & Goswami, 2010;

Leong, Hämäläinen, Soltész & Goswami, 2010). According to Goswami and Bryant

(1990), awareness of vowels is required to learn subsyllabic structure, namely onset and

rhyme, which has been linked to reading development. Since rise time is associated with

vowel onsets, Goswami et al. (2002) proposed that rise time sensitivity contributes to

rhyme awareness and reading attainment.

The second pathway proposed by Wood et al. (2009) involves prosodic facilitation of

the development of phonemic identifi cation and awareness. According to the Percept ual

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Salience Appr oach, syllables that are perceptually salient are more likely to be initially

represented in greater phonological detail than less salient syllables (Echols and Newport,

1992). In English, stressed syllables are salient and are perceptually marked by higher

pitch, longer duration and faster rise times in the amplitude envelope onset (Grosjean and

Gee, 1987). Vihman et al. (2004) found that 11-month-old infants’ recognition of bisyllabic

familiar words is disrupted when the onset consonant of the stressed syllable is manipulat-

ed, but not when the unstressed syllable is manipulated. They concluded that the prosodic

information encoded in infants’ early representations provides an anchor, which infants use

to bootstrap on awareness of phonemes.

Additionally, analyses of early speech productions, both spontaneous and imitated, show

that children tend to represent stressed syllables with more phonemic detail relative to un-

stressed syllables (Roy & Chiat, 2004; Snow, 1998). Although early utterances may be infl u-

enced by other developing factors, such as motor control (Goffman, 1999), analysing speech

production patterns provides an ecologically valid way of studying children’s internal rep-

resentations of speech. McGregor and Johnson (1997) recorded the utterances of 27-month-

old children whose speech ranged from primarily one-syllable to four-syllable productions.

Children at all levels of language development omitted or mispronounced weak syllables

much more often than stressed syllables. Thus, syllables that are stressed and perceptually

more salient are more likely to be represented and produced in full segmental detail.

The independence of prosody and phonology

Given the evidence that prosody is related to multiple aspects of phonological awareness,

some theorists claim that these tasks tap into the same underlying mechanism: the over-

all quality of phonological representations (Ashby, 2006). Goodman et al. (2010) sought

to determine whether prosody and phonology were independent for 5-year-old children

learning how to read. Phonological awareness was measured with a variety of tasks tap-

ping into syllable and phoneme levels of analysis. Prosodic sensitivity was assessed using

the compound noun task from the Profi ling Elements of Prosodic Systems – Children test

(PEPS-C; Wells & Peppé, 2003 ) and the mispronunciation task (Wood, 2006). The PEPS-

C subtest required children to differentiate between compound nouns (e.g., highchair) and

noun phrases (e.g., high chair).

On average, the participants were able to answer 53.35% of the items correctly. In the

mispronunciation task, the children identifi ed an average of 37% of the objects with the

mispronounced stress patterns correctly, indicating that this task was relatively diffi cult for

the 5-year-old children. Performance on the mispronunciation task, but not the PEPS-C,

accounted for unique variance in early reading ability after accounting for receptive

vocabulary and nonverbal intelligence, but did not independently contribute to reading

development after accounting for awareness of phonology. Goodman et al. (2010)

performed a post hoc analysis and found that the phonological awareness measures and the

mispronunciation task shared considerable common variance.

Prosody, phonology and vocabulary in beginning readers

Given the established interrelationships between vocabulary and phonological awareness

(e.g., Carroll et al., 2003; Wise et al., 2007), it is important to include vocabulary in studies

PRESCHOOL PROSODIC PERCEPTION 5

Copyright © 2011 UKLA

of the prosody and phonological awareness. For example, Cardillo (2008) examined pr o-

sodic perception in 5-year-old children using the Tennessee Test of Rhythm and Intonation

Production (T-TRIP; Koike & Asp, 1981). The T-TRIP requires the participant to perceive

and then accurately repeat a series of nonsense syllables (ma) with varying rhythm, tempo

and stress. Performance on the T-TRIP is measured in terms of how many sequences the

participant accurately reproduced and production errors in replicating the rhythm, tempo

and/or stress of items on this task are indicative of poor prosodic perception. Using the

T-TRIP, Cardillo (2008) found that prosodic perception accounted for variance in phono-

logical awareness independently of two measures of vocabulary breadth.

Additionally, Corriveaun et al. (2010) conducted a cross-sectional and longitudinal

study of preschoolers’ and kindergarteners’ performance on a rise time sensitivity task.

In their cross-sectional analysis of 3- to 6-year-old children, they found that thresholds on

the rise time sensitivity accounted for 16%, 14% and 6% of the unique variance in rhyme

awareness, alliteration and sound isolation after accounting for age, receptive vocabulary,

nonverbal IQ and performance on a similar auditory task. Corriveau et al. (2010) also

examined the developmental contribution of rise time sensitivity to rhyme awareness, but

in a smaller age range. Children were assessed at three time points: at 4 years, 5 months;

4 years, 11 months; and at 5 years, 5 months. They found that rise time sensitivity

explained a signifi cant amount of between-person variance in rhyme awareness after par-

tialling out receptive vocabulary and nonverbal IQ.

Although these studies generally show that prosody contributes to phonological aware-

ness beyond receptive vocabulary, not all of the results have found this pattern of results. In

Wood’s (2006) study, she tested 5- to 7-year-old children on a language-specifi c prosodic

sensitivity task, referred to as the mispronunciation task. In this task, participants had to

identify trochaic, bisyllabic words that had been presented with the wrong stress pattern

(i.e., ‘sofa’ was mispronounced as sofá). She found that performance on this prosodic sen-

sitivity task signifi cantly contributed to variance in rhyme detection, but not after account-

ing for receptive vocabulary.

According to Wood et al. (2009), prosody contributes to the development of speech-

processing skills, including speech recognition and representation. To perform well on a

receptive vocabulary task, the participant needs to not only understand the semantic mean-

ing of the word, but they also need to recognise the spoken word and then match it to a

stored representation. Thus, the contribution of prosody to phonological awareness may

be primarily through speech processing, which is shared by receptive vocabulary. Wood’s

(2006) results are also consistent with fi ndings that phonological awareness and receptive

vocabulary are mutually facilitative during emergent literacy (Carroll et al., 2003); yet,

inconsistent with Corriveau et al.’s (2010) results showing a direct link between rise time

sensitivity and rhyme awareness.

These disparate results may also be due to age differences. In Cardillo’s (2008) and

Corriveau et al.’s (2010) studies, the children were younger than in Wood’s (2006) study

and likely had less experience with reading. The relationship between receptive vocabu-

lary and phonological awareness may not be as strong for prereaders and thus, prosody

may contribute to phonological awareness beyond receptive vocabulary before children

begin to learn how to read. Less is known about the contribution of prosody to phono-

logical awareness beyond productive vocabulary. None of these studies used a measure of

vocabulary that assessed depth and thus, none of these studies have explored the possible

mediating role of deeper semantic knowledge in the link between phonological awareness

and prosody.

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Copyright © 2011 UKLA

Current study

Our study focused on examining the role of prosody in the development of phonologi-

cal awareness. Specifi cally, we examined whether vocabulary mediates the link between

prosody and phonological awareness in a sample of prereaders. By studying children prior

to formal reading tuition, we can eliminate the possibility that the observed results are due

to schooling rather than skills that develop prior to entering the classroom. An observed

link between prosody and phonological awareness in emergent literacy would support the

theoretical pathways suggested by Wood et al. (2009) and inform existing theories of read-

ing acquisition.

In the current study, we predict that prosody contributes to phonological awareness inde-

pendently of vocabulary. To control for similar working memory demands between the pro-

sodic perception tasks and the phonological awareness tasks, children’s working memory

was assessed and used in the regression analyses. Moreover, we used both breadth and

depth measures of vocabulary, not just breadth, to expand upon previous fi ndings (Cardillo,

2008; Holliman et al., 2010b; Wood, 2006). According to Wood et al. (2009), prosody con-

tributes to later reading development by facilitating both rhyme awareness and phoneme

awareness; however, the independence of phonology and prosody has been called into

question and no studies have used a priori factor analysis to challenge this claim. The pres-

ent study uses confi rmatory factor analysis to determine whether prosody and phonology

are two separate factors or whether one factor encompassing both prosody and phonology

provides a better fi t for the data. Based on our literature review, we predict that measures of

prosody and phonology will load onto two separate factors.

Methods

Participants

We recruited 50 children (mean age � 61.7 months, SD � 4.2, 33 females) from pre-

schools in Southern California, including Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica,

and Homewood, Illinois. All participants were monolingual English speakers in order to

limit the effects of early language experience. The participants were tested at the end of

their last year in preschool. Informed consent was obtained from the children’s parents and

the experimenters obtained verbal consent from the participants prior to testing. The pre-

reading status of each participant was confi rmed by the child’s preschool teacher. None of

the children were identifi ed as having developmental delays. One participant was excluded

from the study due to shyness.

Measures

Expressive and receptive vocabulary. We used two different measures of vocabulary: one

assessing breadth and one measuring depth. Previous studies have only included receptive

measures of vocabulary, which just assess the size of a child’s vocabulary. To expand upon

these studies, we used a measure of breadth and depth.

The Defi nitional Vocabulary subtest of the Test of Preschool Emergent Literacy (TOPEL)

measured children’s breadth and depth of vocabulary ( Lonigan, Wagner, Torgesen &

Rashotte, 2007). For each of the 70 pictured items the child sees, the experimenter asked

the child to say what it is and to answer a question about one of its important features or

PRESCHOOL PROSODIC PERCEPTION 7

Copyright © 2011 UKLA

attributes (e.g., for bus, ‘What is it for?’). The Cronbach’s (1951) coeffi cient alpha was

reported to be 0.95 for 4-year-olds and 0.94 for 5-year-olds.

Children’s breadth of vocabulary was also assessed using the Receptive One Word

Picture Vocabulary Test (ROWPVT; Brownell, 2000). In this task, children were shown

a page with four pictures. The experimenter said a word and the child picked which

picture best matched that word. This test consisted of 170 items and was normed for

ages 2 to 18. The Cronbach’s (1951) coeffi cient alpha for this test has a median reported

value of 0.90.

Phonological awareness

The phonological awareness tasks used in this study were selected because of the appro-

priate diffi culty level as well as the wide use of the measures in other studies of emergent

literacy (MacLean, Bryant & Bradley, 1987). The Phonological Awareness subtest of the

TOPEL assessed children’s phoneme elision and blending skills ( Lonigan et al., 2007). The

stimuli in these tasks were pronounced by the experimenter for each child in accordance

with the standardised procedure described in the TOPEL test manual. A picture book was

used alongside the auditory stimuli for half of the elision and blending test items to reduce

working memory demands. The elision subtest assessed children’s ability to omit a

phoneme (e.g., ‘Say Heat. Now say Heat without /t/’.) or group of phonemes from a word

(e.g., ‘Say Snowshoe. Now, point to Snowshoe without Snow’; presented with pictures

of a pie, a shoe, a key and a bow). The blending test required the child to blend syllables

together to form a word (e.g., ‘What word do these sounds make: Star – Fish’; presented

with pictures of a stoplight, a person in a swimsuit, a spaceship and a starfi sh) and to blend

single sounds together to form a word (e.g., ‘What word do these sounds make: B – I – ke’).

Half of the items on each subtest required the child to manipulate syllables whereas the

latter half of items involved manipulation of phonemes. There were a total of 27 items. The

Cronbach’s (1951) coeffi cient alpha for this subtest was reported to be 0.86 for 4-year-olds

and 0.88 for 5-year-olds.

The alliteration and rhyme detection tests adapted from MacLean et al. (1987) were also

included to measure phonological awareness. Children had to either match the onsets (e.g.,

‘Does pin start with the same sound as pig or does pin start with the same sound as tree?’)

or rhymes of items (e.g., ‘Does car rhyme with far or does car rhyme with hen?’). The

stimuli were presented live by the experimenter and in accordance with the standardised

procedures described in MacLean et al. (1987) article. There were two practice trials and

10 experimental trials for each subtest. Lonigan et al.’s (1998) found with 5-year-olds that

the rhyme detection test had an internal consistency alpha of .67 and the alliteration detec-

tion task had an alpha of .74.

Short-term memory. The Memory for Digits subtest from the Comprehensive Test of Pho-

nological Processing (CTOPP; Wagner, Torgesen & Rashotte, 1999) was used to assess

the participants’ short-term memory. In this task, a series of digits are played and the par-

ticipant is asked to recall the digits in order. The diffi culty of this forward digit recall task

increases from trial to trial, such that the fi rst item has two digits and the last item has eight

digits. There are a total of 21 items and the reported Cronbach’s (1951) coeffi cient alpha

for this subtest was .78 for 5-year-old children.

Prosodic perception. We chose to use receptive tasks of prosodic perception, the T-TRIP

(Koike & Asp, 1981) and Preschool Repetition Test (PsRep; Chiat & Roy, 2007; Roy &

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Chiat, 2004), rather than tasks that assess prosodic sensitivity, such as the stress manipula-

tion task (Goodman et al., 2010; Holliman et al., 2010a, 2010b; Wood, 2006) and rise time

sensitivity (Corriveau et al., 2010). The T-TRIP and PsRep were both designed for preread-

ing populations in that the tasks were imitative and did not require the children to have a

large vocabulary.

The PsRep (Chiat & Roy, 2007; Roy & Chiat, 2004) was used to assess prosodic percep-

tion. In this task, children were asked to repeat 18 words and 18 nonsense words that ranged

from one to three syllables. The stimuli were pronounced by the experimenter. Nonsense

words were created by changing the vowel of one-syllable words (e.g., egg becomes ogg)

and transposing consonants in two- and three-syllable words (e.g., police becomes lopice).

Six of the two-syllable words and nonsense words had strong–weak stress patterns whereas

the other half had weak–strong patterns. For the three-syllable words, four of the words and

nonwords had a strong–weak–strong pattern, four had a weak–strong–weak pattern and

the last four had a strong–weak–strong pattern in which the last syllable has primary stress

and the fi rst has secondary stress. Due to ceiling effects on the words list (mean correct

� 95.24%, SD � 5.07%), only performance on the list of nonwords was used. Prosodic

perception was determined by calculating the number of weak syllables omitted or mispro-

nounced. The PsRep has a high internal consistency, with an alpha of 0.92.

Prosodic perception was also measured with the T-TRIP (Koike & Asp, 1981). The

rhythm subtest of the T-TRIP was used to assess prosodic perception. In this subtest, the

same nonsense syllable (ma) was repeated between two and six times, but with varying

stress patterns and rhythms. There were a total of 14 items with differing prosodic patterns.

Overall, seven of the items began with a stressed syllable whereas the other seven began

with an unstressed syllable. The stress patterns ranged from simple alternating stressed and

unstressed syllables (e.g., ‘MA – ma – MA- ma’ or ‘ma – MA- ma –MA’) to more compli-

cated patterns (e.g., ‘MA-ma-ma-MA-ma-ma’).

Stimuli in this task were pre-recorded and played through a pair of Phillips SBC HN110

noise-cancelling headphones. The participants listened to each item and then were asked

to repeat the sequence exactly as they heard it. Each item was presented twice. The par-

ticipants’ responses were marked incorrect if the rhythm or stress of the response did not

exactly match the presented item. In order to earn a point for an item, the participant had to

respond correctly to at least one, not both, of the stimulus presentations. Using the Kuder-

Richardson and Hoyt test (Bruning & Kintz, 1977), Koike and Asp (1981) found a high

reliability coeffi cient of 0.85.

Procedure

After receiving written consent from the parent and verbal assent from the participant,

testing was conducted in a quiet area in the participant’s preschool. Testing was broken

down into two sessions in order to reduce testing fatigue. The order of these sessions was

counterbalanced across subjects using random starting order with rotation. The measures in

the test battery were administered according to the guidelines provided in the test manuals.

After each test, the participant received a sticker and after completing their participation in

the study, the participant received a book.

Performance on the standardised measures of phonological awareness and vocabulary

were scored live during the testing session according to the published guidelines. For the

prosodic perception measures, the participants’ responses were recorded and scored later

by two raters, both trained on the scoring rubric for the T-TRIP and the PsRep. For the

PRESCHOOL PROSODIC PERCEPTION 9

Copyright © 2011 UKLA

PsRep, a syllable was considered omitted if the child failed to correctly pronounce all

phonemes of that syllable. Syllable mispronunciations were also marked as incorrect in the

PsRep. To determine the correct pronunciation for the words and phonologically matched

nonwords, the raters referred to the phonological transcriptions specifi ed by Chiat and Roy

(2007). In the case of syllable alterations that were considered ambiguous (e.g., blending

the consonant of one syllable with the vowel of another syllable), the classifi cation was

discussed between raters. There was 100% agreement between the two raters on the PsRep

across all syllables for all participants. The scoring rubric for the T-TRIP involved percep-

tually judging whether the rhythm, tempo and stress of the participants’ responses matched

that of the pre-recorded stimuli. If there was any deviation from the prosodic rhythm of the

test item, that item was marked as incorrect. The percent agreement was 91.55% for the T-

TRIP across all items and for all participants, which is in line with percentage of agreement

statistics reported by other studies using the T-TRIP (Koike & Asp, 1981).

Results

Descriptive statistics

Assumptions of univariate normality and linearity were evaluated and confi rmed using his-

tograms, Quantile–Quantile plots and scatterplots. The assumption of multivariate normal-

ity was examined by using the Chemometrics package in R (R Development Core Team,

2010; Varmuza & Filzmoser, 2009), which calculates the classical Mahalanobis distance

squared. This measure of multivariate normality uses the sample mean and the covariance

structure of the data to identify outliers. Only one subject was classifi ed as an outlier and

fell on the 97.5th percentile, the cut-off point for outliers in this analysis. Due to the natural

range of individual differences in reading, we retained that participant’s scores for further

analysis.

The means, maximums and standard deviations for the measures in the test battery are

displayed in Table 1. All means and standard deviations are based on raw scores. The val-

ues presented are based on the participants’ raw scores, not standard scores. There were no

ceiling or fl oor effects present in any of the measures.

In line with previous emergent literacy research, many of the measures were moderately

inter-correlated (see Table 2). The prosodic perception measures, T-TRIP and PsRep, were

inter-correlated as were the four phonological awareness measures, elision, blending, al-

literation and rhyme. The prosodic perception measures and the phonological awareness

measures were signifi cantly correlated, although the measures of alliteration and rhyme

were not as strongly correlated with performance on the PsRep and not signifi cantly cor-

related with the T-TRIP. Also, the measures of prosodic perception were not as highly

correlated with the measures of expressive and receptive vocabulary as they were to the

phonological awareness tasks. The Memory for Digits task, used to assess the participants’

phonological memory, was signifi cantly correlated with all the measures of the test battery,

except for the T-TRIP.

Confi rmatory factor analysis

We used confi rmatory factor analysis to compare competing theories of the relationship be-

tween prosodic perception and phonological awareness. Namely, we compared the hypoth-

esised one-factor model (one latent variable consisting of all the phonological awareness

10 BEATTIE and MANIS

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and prosodic perception measures; Goodman et al., 2010) against the two-factor model

(separate factors for prosodic perception and phonological awareness; Wood et al., 2009).

Confi rmatory factor analysis allowed us to test the hypothesised structures of these models

against the actual covariance structure of the measured variables. With a participant per

variable ratio of 8.17:1, our analysis falls above the minimum recommended ratio needed

to conduct confi rmatory factor analysis (Gorsuch, 1983).

The proposed two-factor model and one-factor model were fi t using the statistical pack-

age R. Due to the correlated nature of the data, oblique rotation was used. The models were

fi t using the maximum likelihood estimator. The two-factor model had a lower χ2 (8, n �

49. 4.927) compared to the one-factor model (9, n � 49, 8.188), a lower root mean square

error of approximation (RMSEA; 90% CI; [0, 0.116] vs [0, 0.151]), a lower standardised

root mean square residual (SRMR; 0.040 vs 0.060) and Akaike information criterion (AIC,

1214.76 vs 1216.02) and a higher Tucker–Lewis index (TLI; 1.062 vs 1.014). Although

the differences are subtle, all of the model fi t indices indicate that the proposed two-factor

model provides a better fi t for the current data than the one-factor model.

The fi tted two-factor model is shown in Figure 1. All of the measures had factor loadings

higher than .4 for both the phonological awareness and prosodic perception factors and

the error terms were small, indicating that the two-factor model fi t the current data well.

Table 1. Means, standard deviations and ranges for measures in the test battery.

Range

Mean (SD) Min Max

T-TRIP (raw; max: 14) 10.31 (1.80) 7 14

PsRep (raw; max: 14) 2.61 (1.55) 0 8

Blending (raw; max: 15) 10.63 (3.57) 0 15

Elision (raw; max: 12) 8.49 (2.77) 3 12

Alliteration (raw; max: 10) 7.04 (1.90) 3 10

Rhyme (raw; max: 10) 8.20 (1.77) 3 10

ROWPVT (raw; max: 170) 65.40 (9.11) 37 81

ROWPVT (standard score) 107.57 (11.73) 79 127

Def. vocabulary (raw; max: 70) 55.02 (6.73) 38 64

Def. vocabulary (standard score) 100.14 (9.73) 69 115

Memory for digits (raw; max: 21) 11.27 (2.60) 6 16

Table 2. Correlations between measures in the test battery.

Def. Memory

T-TRIP PsRep Elision Blending Alliteration Rhyme ROWPVT vocabulary for digits

T-TRIP

PsRep .376**

Elision .296* .417 **

Blending .283* .499* .715**

Alliteration .081 .298* .441** .502**

Rhyme .215 .298* .612** .633** .530**

ROWPVT .239 .487** .648** .640** .481** .539**

Def. vocabulary .084 .249 .625** .504** .462** .517** .618**

Memory for digits .281 .335* .518** .537** .386** .371** .424** .450**

Note: *p � .05; **p � .01; two-tailed; all correlations are based on raw scores.

PRESCHOOL PROSODIC PERCEPTION 11

Copyright © 2011 UKLA

The results for the phonological awareness variable are consistent with previous studies

using confi rmatory factor analysis showing that for 4- to 5-year-old children, phonologi-

cal awareness measures assessing different levels of awareness strongly load onto a single

factor (Anthony et al., 2002). As we hypothesised, the two latent variables are signifi cantly

correlated (r � .661), indicating that prosodic perception and phonological awareness are

related skills in a sample of prereaders.

Regression analyses

Regression analyses were performed to clarify the role of prosodic perception in develop-

ing phonological awareness independent of vocabulary, both breadth and depth. Composite

variables for prosodic perception and phonological awareness were calculated based on the

results of the confi rmatory factor analysis. To control for the short-term working memory

demands of the prosodic perception and phonological awareness tasks, Memory for Digits

was entered fi rst into all of the hierarchical regression analyses.

Tolerance and variance infl ation factor (VIF) were checked for each predictor in the

regression analyses. These measures are indicative of multicollinearity. All predictors had

a tolerance value above 0.10 (range 0.716–0.861) and none of the VIF statistics were above

Figure 1. The two-factor model of prosodic perception and phonological awareness.

12 BEATTIE and MANIS

Copyright © 2011 UKLA

10 (range 1.162–1.397), which indicated that a perfect relationship did not exist between

the predictor variables and a regression model could be computed.

When predicting phonological awareness, Memory for Digits accounted for 30.2% of the

variance (see Table 3). Receptive vocabulary predicted 26.6% of the variance in phonological

awareness in Step 2. Prosodic perception accounted for a signifi cant amount of variance (6.3%)

in phonological awareness in Step 2, but did not account for a signifi cant amount of variance

(0.7%, ns) after accounting for receptive vocabulary. The overall model with memory for

digits, receptive vocabulary and prosodic perception was signifi cant, F (3, 45)

� 20.317,

p � .001, adjusted R2 � .547; however, only memory for digits (t � 2.605, p � .012) and

receptive vocabulary were signifi cant in the fi nal step of the model (t � 5.493, p � .001). A

commonality of variance analysis revealed that receptive vocabulary and prosodic percep-

tion shared 5.6% of the variance. These results indicate that the contribution of prosodic

perception to phonological awareness was primarily shared with receptive vocabulary.

In the fi nal set of regression analyses (see Table 4), we predicted phonological awareness

from memory for digits, defi nitional vocabulary and prosodic perception. After accounting

for Memory for Digits and defi nitional vocabulary, prosodic perception accounted for 5.4%

of the unique variance in phonological awareness. We found that after accounting for Mem-

ory for Digits and prosodic perception, defi nitional vocabulary accounted for 18.4% of the

variance in phonological awareness. The overall model with memory for digits, defi nitional

vocabulary and prosodic perception was signifi cant, F(3, 45)

� 18.279, p � .001, adjusted

R2 � .519, and all three variables were signifi cant in the fi nal step of the model. A common-

ality of variance analysis revealed that receptive vocabulary and prosodic perception shared

only 0.9% of the variance and thus, both variables contributed uniquely to phonological

awareness in this analysis.

Table 4. Hierarchical regression analyses predicting phonological awareness from defi nitional vocabulary and

prosodic perception.

Step Δr2 Variable Final β SE (β) t p

1 .302*** Memory for digits .241 0.045 2.034 .048

2 .063* Prosodic perception .251 0.107 2.325 .025

3 .193*** Defi nitional vocabulary .481 0.014 4.288 <.001

1 .302*** Memory for digits .241 0.045 2.034 .048

2 .210*** Defi nitional vocabulary .481 0.014 4.288 <.001

3 .054* Prosodic perception .251 0.107 2.325 .025

Note: Total F(3, 45)

for Step 3 � 18.279, p � .001; adjusted R2 � .519, *p � .05; ***p � .001.

Table 3. Hierarchical regression analyses predicting phonological awareness from receptive vocabulary and

prosodic perception.

Step Δr2 Variable Final β SE (β) t p

1 .302*** Memory for digits .287 0.042 2.605 .012

2 .063* Prosodic perception .095 0.110 0.856 .396

3 .231*** Receptive vocabulary .537 0.010 4.719 �.001

1 .302*** Memory for digits .287 0.042 2.605 .012

2 .210*** Receptive vocabulary .537 0.010 4.719 �.001

3 .007 Prosodic perception .095 0.110 0.856 .396

Note: Total F(3, 45)

for Step 3 � 20.317, p � .001; adjusted R2 � .547; *p � .05; ***p � .001.

PRESCHOOL PROSODIC PERCEPTION 13

Copyright © 2011 UKLA

Discussion

The current study examined the role of prosody in the development of phonological aware-

ness. By studying children who have not yet learned how to read, we were able to evalu-

ate whether prosody contributed to phonological awareness prior to any formal reading

instruction. First, the current study investigated whether prosody and phonology were

independent factors. Ashby (2006) proposed that measures of prosody and phonological

awareness assess quality of phonological representations and thus, may tap into the same

underlying mechanism. However, the results from our study do not support this theory. Our

study is the fi rst to use confi rmatory factor analysis to show that prosodic perception and

phonological awareness are distinct but related skills for preschoolers learning how to read.

The model with two separate but correlated factors had better model fi t indices relative to

the one-factor model. In contrast, Goodman et al. (2010) used explanatory factor analysis

and found that prosodic perception and phonological awareness loaded onto the same fac-

tor. Unlike their study, we used a measure that assessed the perception and production of

prosody, and did not observe fl oor effects on measures of prosody. These task differences

could account for the different pattern of results observed in the present study.

Since all measures of phonological awareness strongly loaded onto one factor in our

confi rmatory factor analysis, we used a composite phonological awareness variable to as-

sess whether prosodic perception contributed to both rhyme and phoneme awareness. This

is consistent with Anthony et al. (2002), who found that 4- and 5-year-old children’s perfor-

mance on eight phonological awareness measures all loaded onto the same factor despite

assessing several different levels of awareness. Our regression analyses revealed that after

accounting for short-term memory, prosodic perception signifi cantly predicted 6.3% of the

variance in phonological awareness. This supports previous studies of emergent literacy

linking prosody to rhyme and phonemic awareness (Corriveau et al., 2010; Wood, 2006).

Since phonological awareness is strongly linked to later reading attainment (Bryant et al.,

1990; Stanovich, 1992; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987; Wagner et al., 1994, 1997) and prosodic

perception accounts for variance in phonological awareness in prereading children, the

current results support the indirect link between prosody and reading development through

both rhyme and phonemic awareness.

The current study also examined the different roles that breadth and depth of vocabu-

lary may play in the relationship between phonological awareness and prosodic perception.

Breadth of vocabulary was measured using a receptive picture vocabulary task (ROWPVT)

whereas the depth of vocabulary measure required children to orally defi ne words (TOPEL:

Defi nitional Vocabulary). We found that prosodic perception no longer accounted for signifi -

cant variance in phonological awareness after accounting for memory for digits and recep-

tive vocabulary (0.7%, ns). The commonality of variance analysis indicated that prosodic

perception and receptive vocabulary shared 5.6% of the variance when predicting phonolog-

ical awareness, indicating that prosodic perception contributed to phonological awareness

through shared variance with receptive vocabulary. This is consistent with Wood’s (2006)

study, which found that after accounting for receptive vocabulary, 5- to 7-year-old children’s

prosodic sensitivity no longer accounted for variance in rhyme awareness. Although the cur-

rent study and Wood’s study used different measures of prosody, the same pattern of results

was observed in that the infl uence of prosody on the development of phonological aware-

ness is not separable from that of receptive vocabulary for 5-year-old children.

Performance on receptive vocabulary tasks requires the children to recognise speech and

match that auditory input to existing representations. Thus, receptive tasks of vocabulary

14 BEATTIE and MANIS

Copyright © 2011 UKLA

not only measure semantic knowledge, but also the ability to process speech and the quality

of the underlying phonological representations. The literature on early speech processing

indicates that prosody facilitates the development of speech perception, recognition, seg-

mentation and representation. According to Wood et al. (2009), speech-processing skills

allow children to develop a larger vocabulary and they propose that prosody contributes

to the development of vocabulary breadth. The current results are consistent with this pro-

posal as well as previous studies fi nding a strong, mutually facilitative relationship between

receptive vocabulary and phonological awareness in children just learning how to read

(Carroll et al., 2003; Sénéchal et al., 2006; Silvén et al., 2002). As children gain more

experience with their language, they must learn to discriminate between increasingly simi-

lar sounding words. Distinguishing between these words requires detailed awareness of

phonology (Anglin, 1989) and thus, receptive vocabulary and phonological awareness are

strongly interconnected abilities in emergent literacy. Based on our results and previous

studies, we can conclude that prosody contributes indirectly to the development of pho-

nological awareness by facilitating the speech-processing skills necessary for acquiring a

large vocabulary.

A different pattern of results emerged when we examined the interrelationships

between prosody, phonological awareness and defi nitional vocabulary. We found that pro-

sodic perception accounted for 5.4% of the unique variance in phonological awareness

after accounting for memory for digits and defi nitional vocabulary. Unlike our fi ndings

with receptive vocabulary, these results indicate that depth of vocabulary and prosodic per-

ception make independent contributions to phonological awareness for prereaders. Depth

of vocabulary, like breadth, requires further development of phonological representations

(Oulette, 2006); however, the ability to orally defi ne words requires more than just aware-

ness of the sound structure and the ability to recognise speech.

Our study is the fi rst to incorporate both receptive and defi nitional vocabulary measures

when examining the link between prosody and phonological awareness in emergent lit-

eracy. Taken together, the results of our regression analyses support a link between prosody

and phonological awareness that is independent of depth of vocabulary, but not breadth of

vocabulary. While these results are generally in line with Wood et al.’s (2009) proposed

pathways, the current study supports a more nuanced version of their theory. First, our con-

fi rmatory factor analysis results indicated that by late preschool, measures of phoneme and

rhyme awareness load onto a single phonological awareness factor and thus, we examined

the role of prosody in a composite phonological awareness variable.

Second, the variance that prosody accounted for in phonological awareness was sub-

sumed by receptive vocabulary, but not depth of vocabulary. Previous studies have found

that receptive and defi nitional vocabulary tasks differentially contribute to the development

of phonological awareness (Wise et al., 2007). Whereas receptive vocabulary is thought to

be refl ective of the ability to recognise speech and the quality of the underlying phonological

representation, defi nitional vocabulary requires higher-order language skills and is refl ective

of better encoding, organising and access of words (Ouelette, 2006). Based on our results,

prosody appears to primarily contribute to phonological awareness akin to receptive vocabu-

lary in that better prosodic perception is refl ective of better speech-processing skills. Thus,

these fi ndings add to the growing literature on the role of prosody in emergent literacy by

clarifying that the shallow speech processing, not the deeper semantic, aspect of vocabulary

growth mediates the relationship between prosody and phonological awareness.

One limitation of the current study is the unbalanced male to female ratio. In a meta-

analysis of 165 studies, Hyde and Linn (1988) found a weighted mean effect size of 0.11

PRESCHOOL PROSODIC PERCEPTION 15

Copyright © 2011 UKLA

and concluded that females have a very slight superiority in verbal ability. Since there

were more girls in our study, this may limit the generalisability of the present fi ndings to

the entire prereading population. Our study may also be limited by the low internal con-

sistency of MacLean et al.’s (1987) rhyme awareness measure. The task was chosen based

on its use in previous studies of emergent literacy as well as the short length of the test.

While shorter tasks reduce the attentional demands on the task, shorter tasks also tend to

have lower reliability coeffi cients. Another limitation of the current study is that the tasks

involved perception of prosody rather than manipulation. Although we observed a similar

pattern of results using prosodic perception tasks compared to other studies using prosodic

sensitivity tasks (Wood, 2006), it is possible that the prosodic perception is not powerful

enough to detect more subtle connections between prosody, phonological awareness and

receptive vocabulary.

Further studies should explore the role of prosody in children at risk of later reading

problems. While studies have found that children with a familial risk of dyslexia demon-

strate an insensitivity to prosody (Bree, Alphen, Fikkert & Wijnen, 2008; Bree, Wijnen &

Zonneveld, 2006), no studies have examined the role of prosody in bilingual children who

are acquiring a language with a different prosodic pattern, such as children learning both

English and Spanish. Although many English-language learners show high profi ciency in

English, studies have found that Spanish-speaking English-language learners were less

sensitive to the more complex distributional prosodic patterns when decoding nonwords

compared to native speakers (Guion, Harada & Clark, 2004). Similar to monolingual Eng-

lish-language learners, Naka moto, Lindsey and Manis (2007) found that Spanish-speaking

English-language learners’ reading growth was signifi cantly predicted by phonological

awareness, rapid automatic naming and oral language. Training English-language learners

specifi cally on the English prosodic structure may lead to better vocabulary growth and

phonological awareness as well as reading outcomes.

Taken together, the results from our regression analyses and confi rmatory factor

analysis support the pathways from prosody to phonological awareness proposed by

Wood et al. (2009). Specifi cally, we found that prosody accounted for variance in pho-

nological awareness independent of depth of vocabulary, but not breadth. We concluded

that prosodic perception facilitates the development of phonological awareness indirectly

through receptive vocabulary, by improving the ability to recognise speech and the quality

of the underlying phonological representations, but independently of semantic knowl-

edge. With confi rmatory factor analysis, our results showed that prosodic perception

and phonological awareness are separate but correlated factors. Further studies should

explore this pathway in children acquiring a second language that prosodically differs

from their native language.

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Rache l L. Beattie earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of Southern California

in 2011. She is a member of the Center for the Study of Reading and Dyslexia and her

current research projects include (1) the role of prosodic perception in typical and atypical

reading acquisition and (2) auditory and visual perception in children and adults with a

history of dyslexia.

Frank R. Manis is Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern California. He

has published 60 articles on reading disabilities, development of literacy and biliteracy and

cognitive neuropsychology. He has been funded for 12 years by the National Institute of

Child Health and Human Development to study reading in children and adults with dyslexia.

He served a 5-year term as editor of Scientifi c Studies of Reading. His current projects in-

clude (1) studies of auditory and visual perception in children and adults with a history of

dyslexia and (2) structural and functional MRI studies of adults with reading diffi culties.

Received 7 October 2011; revised version received 10 October 2011.

Add ress for correspondence: Rachel Beattie, Department of Psychology, University of

Southern California, 3620 South McClintock Ave, SGM 501, Los Angeles, CA 90089-

1061, USA. E-mail: beattie@usc.edu