Prosodic sensitivity and phoneme awareness as predictors of reading fluency in German

Abstract

There are contradictory findings in the literature about prosodic sensitivity’s contribution to reading. In this study, we examined whether prosodic sensitivity makes a unique contribution to different reading outcomes in German after controlling for the effects of phonological awareness. Word reading, nonword reading and sentence reading as well as phonological awareness (PA), prosodic sensitivity (PS), and nonverbal IQ were assessed in a sample of N = 207 8- to 10-year-old German-speaking children in third grade. Results showed that after controlling for PA, PS was predictive of only sentence reading. A commonality analysis further showed that PS and PA share about 22% of the explained variance (R2 =.13) in sentence reading, while PS uniquely contributes 18% and PA 60% of this variance. The results indicate that PS is more strongly related to reading tasks with semantic demands.