Processing of syllable stress is functionally different from phoneme processing and does not profit from literacy acquisition

Speech is characterized by phonemes and prosody. Neurocognitive evidence supports the separate processing of each type of information. Therefore, one might suggest individual development of both pathways. In this study, we examine literacy acquisition in middle childhood. Children become aware of the phonemes in speech at that time and refine phoneme processing when they acquire an alphabetic writing system. We test whether an enhanced sensitivity to phonemes in middle childhood extends to other aspects of the speech signal, such as prosody. To investigate prosodic processing, we used stress priming. Spoken stressed and unstressed syllables (primes) preceded spoken German words with stress on the first syllable (targets). We orthogonally varied stress overlap and phoneme overlap between the primes and onsets of the targets. Lexical decisions and Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) for the targets were obtained for pre-reading preschoolers, reading pupils and adults. The behavioral and ERP results were largely comparable across all groups. The fastest responses were observed when the first syllable of the target word shared stress and phonemes with the preceding prime. ERP stress priming and ERP phoneme priming started 200 ms after the target word onset. Bilateral ERP stress priming was characterized by enhanced ERP amplitudes for stress overlap. Left-lateralized ERP phoneme priming replicates previously observed reduced ERP amplitudes for phoneme overlap. Groups differed in the strength of the behavioral phoneme priming and in the late ERP phoneme priming effect. The present results show that enhanced phonological processing in middle childhood is restricted to phonemes and does not extend to prosody. These results are indicative of two parallel processing systems for phonemes and prosody that might follow different developmental trajectories in middle childhood as a function of alphabetic literacy.

[1]  Alexandra Jesse,et al.  Please Scroll down for Article the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Early Use of Phonetic Information in Spoken Word Recognition: Lexical Stress Drives Eye Movements Immediately , 2022 .

[2]  A. Cutler,et al.  Exploring the Role of Lexical stress in Lexical Recognition , 2005, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.

[3]  David Poeppel,et al.  Cortical oscillations and speech processing: emerging computational principles and operations , 2012, Nature Neuroscience.

[4]  Jonathan Grainger,et al.  Watching the Word Go by: On the Time-course of Component Processes in Visual Word Recognition , 2009, Lang. Linguistics Compass.

[5]  S. Zecker,et al.  The orthographic code: Developmental trends in reading-disabled and normally-achieving children , 1991, Annals of dyslexia.

[6]  P Berg,et al.  A multiple source approach to the correction of eye artifacts. , 1994, Electroencephalography and clinical neurophysiology.

[7]  Ulla Richardson,et al.  The effects of spelling consistency on phonological awareness: a comparison of English and German. , 2005, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[8]  Claudia K. Friedrich,et al.  Neuronal spoken word recognition: The time course of processing variation in the speech signal , 2012 .

[9]  Paola Escudero,et al.  The Effect of L1 Orthography on Non-native Vowel Perception , 2010, Language and speech.

[10]  U. Goswami,et al.  Phonological Skills and Learning to Read , 1993, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[11]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer , 2002 .

[12]  D. Poeppel,et al.  Speech perception at the interface of neurobiology and linguistics , 2008, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[13]  Harald Marx,et al.  Bielefelder Screening zur Früherkennung von Lese- Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten (BISC) , 2000 .

[14]  Claudia K. Friedrich,et al.  Pitch modulates lexical identification in spoken word recognition: ERP and behavioral evidence. , 2004, Brain research. Cognitive brain research.

[15]  David Poeppel,et al.  The analysis of speech in different temporal integration windows: cerebral lateralization as 'asymmetric sampling in time' , 2003, Speech Commun..

[16]  J. Bradshaw,et al.  The nature of hemispheric specialization in man , 1981, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[17]  Régine Kolinsky,et al.  The development of the orthographic consistency effect in speech recognition: From sublexical to lexical involvement , 2007, Cognition.

[18]  Claudia K. Friedrich,et al.  Neurophysiological evidence for underspecified lexical representations: asymmetries with word initial variations. , 2008, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[19]  Richard S. J. Frackowiak,et al.  Endogenous Cortical Rhythms Determine Cerebral Specialization for Speech Perception and Production , 2007, Neuron.

[20]  John M. Tomlinson,et al.  The perceptual nature of stress shifts , 2014 .

[21]  J. McQueen,et al.  Foreign Subtitles Help but Native-Language Subtitles Harm Foreign Speech Perception , 2009, PloS one.

[22]  Brigitte Röder,et al.  Electrophysiological indices of word fragment priming allow characterizing neural stages of speech recognition , 2009, Biological Psychology.

[23]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Reading acquisition, developmental dyslexia, and skilled reading across languages: a psycholinguistic grain size theory. , 2005, Psychological bulletin.

[24]  Jonathan Grainger,et al.  Masked Orthographic and Phonological Priming in Visual Word Recognition and Naming: Cross-Task Comparisons , 1996 .

[25]  Amanda C. Walley,et al.  Spoken vocabulary growth: Its role in the development of phoneme awareness and early reading ability , 2003 .

[26]  Claudia K. Friedrich,et al.  ERP correlates of word onset priming in infants and young children , 2014, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

[27]  A. Prince,et al.  On stress and linguistic rhythm , 1977 .

[28]  James R. Booth,et al.  Children with reading difficulties show differences in brain regions associated with orthographic processing during spoken language processing , 2010, Brain Research.

[29]  J. Ziegler,et al.  Orthography shapes the perception of speech: The consistency effect in auditory word recognition , 1998 .

[30]  Heikki Lyytinen,et al.  The development of children at familial risk for dyslexia: Birth to early school age , 2004, Annals of dyslexia.

[31]  David Poeppel,et al.  Cortical Oscillations in Auditory Perception and Speech: Evidence for Two Temporal Windows in Human Auditory Cortex , 2012, Front. Psychology.

[32]  A. Cutler,et al.  Constraints of Lexical Stress on Lexical Access in English: Evidence from Native and Non-native Listeners , 2002, Language and speech.

[33]  S. Soto-Faraco,et al.  Journal of Memory and Language , 2001 .

[34]  R. Cheloha,et al.  The of a Development , 2004 .

[35]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat: doing phonetics by computer , 2003 .

[36]  Niels O. Schiller,et al.  The nature of hemispheric specialization for linguistic and emotional prosodic perception: A meta-analysis of the lesion literature , 2011, Neuropsychologia.

[37]  James R. Booth,et al.  Reading acquisition reorganizes the phonological awareness network only in alphabetic writing systems , 2013, Human brain mapping.

[38]  M Ingvar,et al.  The illiterate brain. Learning to read and write during childhood influences the functional organization of the adult brain. , 1998, Brain : a journal of neurology.

[39]  R. Zatorre,et al.  Spectral and temporal processing in human auditory cortex. , 2001, Cerebral cortex.

[40]  J. Morais,et al.  The developmental turnpoint of orthographic consistency effects in speech recognition. , 2008, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[41]  L. Maffei,et al.  I. Neurophysiological evidence , 1982 .

[42]  A. Boemio,et al.  Hierarchical and asymmetric temporal sensitivity in human auditory cortices , 2005, Nature Neuroscience.

[43]  R. Wiese,et al.  The influence of rhythmic (ir)regularities on speech processing: Evidence from an ERP study on German phrases , 2013, Neuropsychologia.

[44]  D. Poeppel,et al.  Sensitivity of Newborn Auditory Cortex to the Temporal Structure of Sounds , 2009, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[45]  Claudia K. Friedrich,et al.  Neurophysiological correlates of mismatch in lexical access , 2005, BMC Neuroscience.

[46]  R. C. Oldfield.  The assessment and analysis of handedness: the Edinburgh inventory. , 1971, Neuropsychologia.

[47]  Claudia K. Friedrich,et al.  Learning to read shapes the activation of neural lexical representations in the speech recognition pathway , 2011, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.