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WE 8: Canonical trochees in reading development

During reading development, children have to construct connections between orthography, phonology and meaning, also described as orthographic mapping (Ehri 2014). While grapho-syllabic mappings have received much interest, mappings at the foot level have largely been ignored, or are underspecified in psycholinguistic models of reading, despite the fact that they are fundamental components of reading fluency and comprehension (Noack 2004, Zepnik 2016).

It is an open question how children develop grapho-prosodic mappings at the foot level. Children have been found to be sensitive to syllable boundaries (Hasenäcker & Schröder 2017) and stress patterns in written sentences (Sauter et al. 2012), suggesting that they can rely on bottom-up and top-down knowledge when they have to construct feet on orthographic input. However, qualitative analyses of children’s reading aloud indicates that mappings at the foot level often continues to be a source of difficulty in primary school children and even later (Noack 2004; Zepnik 2016). This is especially true for the weak element within the trochee, which, given the canonical foot form in German, typically corresponds to a reduced syllable. This raises the need to better understand the processing of canonical trochees in reading.

In a combined cross-sectional and longitudinal design, the planned project will examine reading processes in 2nd and 4th graders (n = 60 each) with a range of reading skills, addressing the following research questions:

1. To what extent are 2nd and 4th graders aware of grapho-syllablic boundaries within canonical trochees?
2. To what extent is grapho-prosodic mapping at the foot level evident in children's reading in the course of the 2nd and 4th grades?
3. What are the interrelations between awareness to grapho-syllablic boundaries, grapho-prosodic mapping at the foot level, reading performance, and reading-related factors?

We will longitudinally test (at the beginning and end of each grade level) children‘s awareness to syllable boundaries of written stimuli, and conduct running records for the children's reading of canonical trochees in various reading contexts. In addition, we will test reading with standardized measures, and collect reading-related data, including social-cultural background of the children, their age, and cognitive and oral language skills. Finally, teachers will be interviewed to better understand the context of children's reading instruction. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data are planned. We predict that children will show a variance in word-prosodification in reading, and that this skill will improve with age. We also expect relations between word-prosodification, reading and previously established reading-related factors. As a central outcome, the results will provide empirical evidence of how grapho-prosodic mappings at the foot level develop, thereby contributing to their integration into models of reading development.