Elsevier

Clinical Neurophysiology

Volume 130, Issue 8, August 2019, Pages 1329-1341
Clinical Neurophysiology

Phonemes, words, and phrases: Tracking phonological processing in pre-schoolers developing dyslexia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2019.05.018Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Phonological processing in preschoolers with and without later literacy problems.

  • Electrophysiological correlates of phoneme-, word-, and phrase-level phonology.

  • Deficits at phoneme- and word-, but not at phrase-level in children with later literacy problems.

Abstract

Objectives

Individuals with dyslexia often suffer from deficient segmental phonology, but the status of suprasegmental phonology (prosody) is still discussed.

Methods

In three passive-listening event-related brain potential (ERP) studies, we examined prosodic processing in literacy-impaired children for various prosodic units by contrasting the processing of word-level and phrase-level prosody, alongside segmental phonology. We retrospectively analysed school children’s ERPs at preschool age for discrimination of vowel length (phoneme processing), discrimination of stress pattern (word-level prosody), and processing of prosodic boundaries (phrase-level prosody).

Results

We found differences between pre-schoolers with and without later literacy difficulties for phoneme and stress pattern discrimination, but not for prosodic boundary perception.

Conclusion

Our findings complement the picture of phonological processing in dyslexia by confirming difficulties in segmental phonology and showing that prosodic processing is affected for the smaller word level, but not the larger phrase level.

Significance

These findings might have implications for early interventions, considering both phonemic awareness and stress pattern training.

Keywords

Phonology
Prosody
Literacy impairment
Vowel length discrimination
Word stress discrimination
Prosodic boundary processing

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