Abstract
Purpose:
Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds.
Method:
Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a speech perception and a production task. In the perception task, a behavioral adaptation of the oddball paradigm was used. Children had to detect orthographically consistent /t/, which has a unique orthographic representation (〈t〉), and inconsistent /k/, which maps onto three different graphemes (〈c〉, 〈qu〉, and 〈k〉), both appearing infrequently within a repetitive auditory sequence. In the production task, children produced these same sounds in meaningless syllables.
Results:
Perception results show that all children were faster at detecting consistent than inconsistent sounds regardless of their decoding skills. In the production task, however, the same facilitation for consistent sounds was linked to better decoding skills.
Conclusions:
These findings demonstrate differences in speech sound processing related to literacy acquisition. Literacy acquisition may therefore affect already-formed speech sound representations. Crucially, the strength of this link in production is modulated by individual decoding skills.
Effects related to literacy acquisition have been observed at different levels of speech processing. This study investigated the link between orthographic knowledge and children's perception and production of specific speech sounds.
Method:
Sixty Spanish-speaking second graders, differing in their phonological decoding skills, completed a speech perception and a production task. In the perception task, a behavioral adaptation of the oddball paradigm was used. Children had to detect orthographically consistent /t/, which has a unique orthographic representation (〈t〉), and inconsistent /k/, which maps onto three different graphemes (〈c〉, 〈qu〉, and 〈k〉), both appearing infrequently within a repetitive auditory sequence. In the production task, children produced these same sounds in meaningless syllables.
Results:
Perception results show that all children were faster at detecting consistent than inconsistent sounds regardless of their decoding skills. In the production task, however, the same facilitation for consistent sounds was linked to better decoding skills.
Conclusions:
These findings demonstrate differences in speech sound processing related to literacy acquisition. Literacy acquisition may therefore affect already-formed speech sound representations. Crucially, the strength of this link in production is modulated by individual decoding skills.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 4507-4519 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research |
Volume | 65 |
Early online date | 4 Nov 2022 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 12 Dec 2022 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgmentsThis project has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (Grant Agreement No. 819093 to C.D.M.) and under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No 843533 to A.S. This work was also supported by the Spanish State Research Agency through Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation CEX2020-001010-S, the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PSI2017 82941-P and PID2020-113926GB-I00), and the Basque Government (BERC 2022-2025 and PIBA18_29). M.J. was supported by a Predoctoral fellowship (associated to the Project PSI2017 82941-P; Grant No. PRE-2018-083946) from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the Fondo Social Europeo. The authors would like to thank Mamen González for her help with data collection, Magda Altmann for her help with editing the manuscript, and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions improved the quality of the article.
Data Availability Statement
The data sets generated during and/or analyzed during this study are available in the OSF repository, https://osf.io/k3nvx/?view_only=b767cdbeae16408ebeeda0324e9d727c.Fingerprint
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