Evaluation of reading skill in third grade children using acoustic analysis

Mariana Hargreaves Araújo,Plínio Almeida Barbosa

doi:10.1590/s0102-44502010000200001

Mariana Hargreaves Araújo, Plínio Almeida Barbosa

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1590/s0102-44502010000200001

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Abstract

In order to make a detailed observation of some variables in reading performance, two third grade (second series in Brazil) children were selected from a group because their performance differed widely in terms of frequency and type of silent pauses and reading aloud rate. The group was formed by 32 children from 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th grades. And, from an acoustic phonetic analysis of data, we were able to measure the reading aloud rate expressed in VV units per second, as well as observing performance and prosody such as: absolute frequency, duration and type of hesitant and non-hesitant silent pauses; stress group average duration; absolute frequency and duration of VV units per stress group; duration of units comprising the first vowel coming before a silent pause and the same. Statistical analysis suggests that the variable silent pause duration does not seem to differ among the children. However, some aspects like number of VV units per stress group, reading aloud rate, frequency and type of hesitant silent pauses vary a lot and may be important as parameters for reading performance.

Highlights

To what was observed in adults, some children in this research produced silent pauses that did not fit in Merlo’s (2006) definition, since, contrary to adults, non-hesitant silent pauses appeared frequently at weak syntactic boundaries, especially in the group of children considered by their teachers as “non-fluents”
Child B’s non-hesitant silent pauses happens before possible familiar words, indicating that she is still probably in a moment of development that requires a few milliseconds to pause in order to mentally “confirm” the subsequent familiar word or the group of familiar words in her memory to be able to read them by sight
An acoustic phonetic analysis carried out to evaluate two girls from third grade showed that some reading performance parameters were extremely different

Summary

Introduction

Subject performance in reading has attracted the attention of many researchers. Issues such as how skilled readers recognize printed words, how the eye movements during reading are controlled, factors limiting reading comprehension, and how to improve reading teaching, are all of central concern in the scientific studies of reading (Snowling; Hulme, 2007). The decoding and understanding of single words by visually identifying them, and associating them with their pronunciation and meaning, is a process taken as the foundation of reading, called word recognition. If word recognition processes do not work efficiently, reading will be deeply affected. In this experimental study, we shall endeavor to basically restrict our study to word recognition, especially the decoding stage

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