Objectives: This study examined children aged 4 to 5 years old, about the influence of prosodic sensitivity on Hangul word reading. Furthermore, it was intended to explore whether cognitive-linguistic skills including phonological and morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge plays mediating roles between children’s prosodic sensitivity and word reading.
Methods: Participants in this study included 50 4-year-old children and 66 5-year-old children (N = 116).
Children were tested with tasks on word reading, nonverbal intelligence, prosody sensitivity (compound nouns, intonation and duration tasks) and phonological awareness (syllabic, phoneme onset, and phoneme coda awareness), orthographic knowledge, and morphological awareness.
Results: Hierarchy regression results showed that prosodic sensitivity significantly accounted for reading words over and above biological age, nonverbal intelligence, and cognitive-linguistic factors (phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, morphological awareness). In addition, the intonation sensitivity in prosodic sensitivity uniquely explains word reading. The results of a multiple mediation analysis to determine whether cognitive-linguistic variables, including phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and morphological awareness, mediated in the relationship between prosodic sensitivity and word reading showed that prosodic sensitivity did not have a significant effect on word reading through a direct path, but through indirect paths of syllable and phoneme coda awareness.
Conclusions: This study suggests that prosodic sensitivity in Korean children is a cognitive construct independent of phonological awareness, and that phonological awareness mediates between prosodic sensitivity and word reading. These results indicate the importance of prosody sensitivity in literacy development among Korean children.