Gutiérrez-Palma, N. 1 , Defior, S. 2 & Calet, N. 2
1 University of Jaen, Department of Psychology
2 University of Granada, Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology
This work aims to study the acquisition of punctuation marks, an aspect of the written script closely related to prosody and syntax. In particular, we focus on the role of prosodic sensitivity, i.e., the capacity to detect prosody in the oral language. Prosodic sensitivity is a topic of growing interest in the field of reading acquisition (see 2006 special issue of Journal of Research in Reading); however, his study has been mainly focused on word processing. In this work we investigate whether prosodic sensitivity could also affect phrase processing, through the acquisition of punctuation marks. We used a cross-sectional design, with 4th and 6th grade children. They performed prosodic and control tasks, as well as a comprehension and a punctuation writing task. There were two types of prosodic tasks, at the word and phrase-levels. At the word-level, the task consisted of indicating the syllable that sounded stronger in a three-syllabic pseudoword. At the phrase-level, it consisted of indicating whether two sentences sounded similar (the first sentence was low-pass filtered; and then participants were presented the original sentence or another one with a different metrical pattern). Control measures were working memory, phonological awareness, and non-speech rhythm skills. The comprehension task consisted of a sentence-picture matching task. The punctuation writing task consisted of punctuating unpunctuated sentences according to a particular meaning. Results showed that prosodic sensitivity accounted for a significant and unique variance of the punctuation task. These results are discussed in terms of how prosodic sensitivity may affect the acquisition of the prosodic aspects of reading, as the punctuation marks.