Abstract
Researchers have established a relationship between beginning readers' silent comprehension ability and their prosodic fluency, such that readers who read aloud with appropriate prosody tend to have higher scores on silent reading comprehension assessments. The current study was designed to investigate this relationship in two groups of high school readers: Specifically Poor Comprehenders (SPCs), who have adequate word level and phonological skills but poor reading comprehension ability, and a group of age- and decoding skill-matched controls. We compared the prosodic fluency of the two groups by determining how effectively they produced prosodic cues to syntactic and semantic structure in imitations of a model speaker's production of syntactically and semantically varied sentences. Analyses of pitch and duration patterns revealed that speakers in both groups produced the expected prosodic patterns; however, controls provided stronger durational cues to syntactic structure. These results demonstrate that the relationship between prosodic fluency and reading comprehension continues past the stage of early reading instruction. Moreover, they suggest that prosodically fluent speakers may also generate more fluent implicit prosodic representations during silent reading, leading to more effective comprehension.
Highlights
Successful reading comprehension is a complex skill supported by a variety of subskills
Results from Schwanenflugel and colleagues demonstrate that prosodic fluency is predictive of reading comprehension ability for beginning readers between the ages of 6 and 9
There is reason to suspect that the relationship between prosodic fluency and comprehension ability continues to change as students’ proficiency improves, and as their prosodic skills improve (Kuhn et al, 2010)
Summary
Successful reading comprehension is a complex skill supported by a variety of subskills. More recent research has highlighted the importance of specific components of reading comprehension, among them the role of reading fluency (e.g., Fuchs et al, 2001; Kuhn and Stahl, 2003; Schilling et al, 2007; Hudson et al, 2009) These studies and others suggest that readers who “sound good” when reading aloud are good comprehenders. One definition of fluency has its roots in LaBerge and Samuels’s (1974) automaticity theory of reading, which maintains that readers must have automated the lower-level processes of word recognition in order to devote cognitive resources to higher-order processes of comprehension. According to this view, reading fluency is defined as the number
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