Lexical prosodic representation and access in Japanese children with developmental dyslexia

Recent research indicates that awareness of the prosodic information present in spoken language could be an important factor for literacy development, and that adults with developmental dyslexia show impaired awareness of lexical prosodic information, while the phonological representations remain intact. We investigated lexical prosodic representation and awareness in Japanese children with and without developmental dyslexia. Lexical prosodic representation was investigated using a cross-modal fragment priming task, and awareness was examined using a fragment identification task. The task was modified for children by selecting words with higher familiarity and fewer trials. As a result, the same pattern of prosodic priming effects was observed between groups; lexical decision time was faster in the prosodic congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. In addition, accuracy and reaction time did not show group differences in the fragment identification task. Relationship between prosody and literacy development may differ between languages but the sample size were small in both groups. Further investigation with larger sample size is required.