The role of prosody in reading comprehension: evidence from poor comprehenders

Abstract

Text reading prosody and reading comprehension are related, but both rely on decoding.The aim of the current study was, therefore, to disentangle the contribution of decoding from that of prosody skills. We examined the performance on text reading prosody and speech prosody in fifth-grade children with age-appropriate decoding but weak comprehension. We compared their performance with that of chronological-age controls and younger, comprehension-level controls. We found that poor comprehenders scored significantly below the chronological-age controls on all prosody tasks. Importantly, poor comprehenders scored below the younger, comprehension-level controls on a speech rhythm task. Furthermore, speech prosody explained unique variance in predicting reading comprehension status (poor comprehender vs comprehension-level control). This suggests that poor comprehenders have a delay in prosodic development, with an additional indication of a deficiency in perception and production of speech prosody. The results show that the relation between text reading prosody and reading comprehension does not exclusively rely on decoding. Highlights What is already known about this topic• Text reading prosody has consistently been shown to be related to reading comprehension.• Text reading prosody and reading comprehension both rely on decoding efficiency.• The role of speech prosody in reading comprehension is less widely investigated. What this paper adds• The role of decoding in reading comprehension has been separated from the role of prosody skills in reading comprehension.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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

“…Nevertheless, the direction of this relationship appears to remain unclearthat is, is it reading fluency that improves reading comprehension or reading comprehension that boosts reading fluency. More recent studies mostly suggest that it is prosody that influences understanding (Groen et al, 2019). Therefore, working to improve prosody would appear to involve working on the comprehension of texts.…”

“…Nevertheless, this automaticity is not enough on its own; prosody, which plays a fundamental role in the development of reading comprehension (Kuhn & Stahl, ), is also necessary. This role of prosody can be explained in the sense that it allows the unification of retrieved words on a phonological, syntactic and semantic level (Groen, Veenendaal, & Verhoeven, ). Thus, prosody is not only one of the fundamental pillars of reading fluency, it is also essential for attaining a good level of reading comprehension (e.g., Miller & Schwanenflugel, , ; Schwanenflugel et al, ; Benjamin & Schwanenflugel, ; Álvarez‐Cañizo, Suárez‐Coalla, & Cuetos, ; Lopes, Silva, Moniz, Spear‐Swerling, & Zibulsky, ).…”

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“…Prosody is required for all applications of language, even in fluent reading where a proper expression (of which prosody is the motor) is as important as a proper rate (speed), and accuracy (correct decoding of the letters) (Groen, Veenendaal & Verhoeven, 2019;Reading Rockets, 2019;International Literacy Association (ILA), 2018;Hasbrouck and Glaser, 2012;Paige, Rasinski, Magpuri-Lavell, 2012;Sitaram & Mostow, 2012;National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIH), 2000;National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 1995). During prosodic reading, a total of six prosodic characteristics are defined: pausal intrusions, length of phrases, appropriateness of phrases, final phrase lengthening, terminal intonation contours (e.g., lowering the voice after a group of words), and stress (Kuhn & Stahl, 2003citing Dowhower, 1991.…”

The Heterogeneity of Reading-Related Difficulties in Chinese

“…Another branch of research investigated the contribution of higher order language skills to reading comprehension which is not theorized in the Simple View of Reading, such as the processing of prosodic information, comprehension monitoring, and inference-making (e.g., [73][74][75][76][77][78][79]). For instance, reading comprehension could be impaired if individuals fail to recognize appropriate prosodic features and construct meaningful oral expression [80].…”