Development of reading prosody in school‐age Spanish children: a longitudinal study

Abstract

Background: Prosodic reading is one of the steps needed to achieve reading fluency. It is already known that English children develop their reading prosody from the earliest grades of primary school, showing the greatest improvement between first and second grade, but there are no Spanish studies of the development of reading prosody in the first years of school. Reading prosody may develop earlier in Spanish children as Spanish is a transparent language, which makes it possible to achieve high accuracy in the first year of learning to read. Method: We performed a longitudinal study, monitoring children from first to third grade. The children were asked to read aloud a text including declarative sentences containing high-frequency and low-frequency words and interrogative sentences; we analysed the usual prosodic variables (i.e., pauses, duration of different segments and pitch variations). Results: The results showed that younger readers made more and longer pauses and read less accurately. Moreover, the frequency words affected accuracy in all three grades, but only modified reading time in the first and second grades. We found no differences between the grades with respect to declarative sentences, but reading in all grades was influenced by word frequency, with a flatter final intonation. In the case of interrogative sentences, we found that first graders had a flatter melodic contour, whereas second graders tended to exaggerate the final change in intonation. Conclusions: Our results confirmed that reading fluency increases dramatically between first and second grade. Although Spanish has a transparent orthographic system, Spanish children seem to develop reading prosody similarly to children using opaque languages.

Reading Spanish Prosody: The Role of Word Reading and Syntactic Knowledge

“…The results of our study also aligned with existing literature and highlighted the relationship between prosody and syntactic skills (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2020a(Álvarez-Cañizo et al, , 2020bMokhtari & Thompson, 2006;Nomvete & Easterbrooks, 2020;Veenendaal et al, 2014). Most of these studies, with the exception of Veenendaal et al (2014), discovered stronger bivariate correlations than those observed in our research, irrespective of whether they employed spectrographic measures (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2020a(Álvarez-Cañizo et al, , 2020b or rating scales (Mokhtari & Thompson, 2006;Nomvete & Easterbrooks, 2020).…”

“…The results of our study also aligned with existing literature and highlighted the relationship between prosody and syntactic skills (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2020a(Álvarez-Cañizo et al, , 2020bMokhtari & Thompson, 2006;Nomvete & Easterbrooks, 2020;Veenendaal et al, 2014). Most of these studies, with the exception of Veenendaal et al (2014), discovered stronger bivariate correlations than those observed in our research, irrespective of whether they employed spectrographic measures (Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2020a(Álvarez-Cañizo et al, , 2020b or rating scales (Mokhtari & Thompson, 2006;Nomvete & Easterbrooks, 2020). The difference in the strength of the relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading prosody, when compared to Álvarez-Cañizo et al (2020aÁlvarez-Cañizo et al ( , 2020b-the only similar study involving Spanish-speaking participants-may be partly explained by the fact that their participants were high school students and at least two years older than our sample population.…”

“…This correlation leads to a critical distinction: While syntactic knowledge requires the understanding of sentence structure and grammatical rules, syntactic awareness is about the ability to consciously reflect on and manipulate these structures. While previous research has primarily focused on syntactic awareness, with Álvarez-Cañizo et al (2020a, 2020b) being an exception, our study specifically emphasized syntactic knowledge.…”

“…Second, the proper, expressive reading of sentences has been characterized by range variations in intonation or pitch (e.g., Cowie et al, 2002), which allow the reader's words to sound like natural language (Rasinski et al, 2009). The results of studies of expressive reading in children have demonstrated that skilled readers showed larger downward and upward pitch shifts for declarative and question-and-exclamation sentences, respectively, than did inexperienced readers (e.g., Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2018Álvarez-Cañizo et al, , 2020aÁlvarez-Cañizo et al, , 2020bMiller & Schwanenflugel, 2006). Finally, pausing entailed breaks in vocalizing, including repetitions and hesitations (Benjamin et al, 2013).…”

“…Unlike the above studies, others have only indirectly analyzed the relationship between syntactic skills and reading prosody (e.g., Álvarez-Cañizo et al, 2020aÁlvarez-Cañizo et al, , 2020bVeenendaal et al, 2014). Álvarez-Cañizo et al (2020aÁlvarez-Cañizo et al ( , 2020b investigated how secondary school students develop their reading fluency across different sentence types. In addition to other tasks, participants completed standardized syntactic knowledge tasks (Cuetos et al, 2016) and underwent spectrographic analysis to measure prosodic reading.…”