Lexical prosodic competence and word reading in adult EFL learners

Abstract

The relationship between lexical prosodic competence and word reading was explored, taking into consideration of phonemic awareness and morphological awareness. A total of 90 Chinese university freshmen learning English as a foreign language participated in the study. Two measures were administered to examine their English lexical prosodic competence, i.e., word stress perception and stress production in nonneutral derivatives (derived forms with stress-shifting suffixes, e.g., able + ity → ability). Two measures were administered to examine their English word reading ability, i.e., word identification and nonword decoding. A series of hierarchical regression and mediation analyses were conducted. Both lexical prosodic competences predicted word identification and nonword decoding, respectively, after controlling for nonverbal reasoning, oral vocabulary, and other metalinguistic skills. Word stress perception continued to independently explain unique variance in word identification. Despite the different prosodic systems between Mandarin and English, the adult EFL learners possessed a sensitivity to the primary stress in English multisyllabic words and may have implicit awareness of stress shift cued by nonneutral suffixes. Both types of lexical prosodic competence had direct effects on word identification and nonword decoding. Their relationships to word identification were partially mediated by phonemic awareness and morphological awareness, whereas their relationships to nonword decoding were partially mediated by phonemic awareness only. The combined results provide evidence for the important role of lexical prosodic competence in word reading development and also point to the relevance of this role for adult EFL learners.