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Reading fluency skill and the prosodic marking of linguistic focus

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Abstract

The purposes of the study were to determine whether third grade children mark linguistic focus features in their reading prosody and whether strong marking of these linguistic focus features might comprise an aspect of expressive reading typical of skilled, fluent reading. Children read a passage targeting information focusing aspects of prosody (direct quote, contrastive words, and exclamations). They also read a grade-level passage from the Qualitative Reading Inventory (Leslie & Caldwell, 2011) and completed the sight word subtest of Test of Word Reading Efficiency-2 (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 2012). Children marked direct quote, contrastive words, and exclamations with a higher pitch than when in an unmarked context. They marked contrastive words and exclamations with greater intensity compared to an unmarked context. Further, reading fluency skill as determined by quick and accurate reading was connected to oral reading prosody that was generally more expressive for both sentence and linguistic focus prosodic features.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the children of Barrow County, GA, and Hazlet, NJ for their participation in this study. We thank Lilly Steiner, Carolyn Groff, Stephanie Lai, and Adam Reed for collecting some of the data reported here. Some of the information reported here was presented previously in July, 2012 at the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading meeting in Montreal, Quebec CANADA. Correspondence regarding this manuscript should be sent to Dr. Paula J. Schwanenflugel, Department of Educational Psychology, 325 Aderhold Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602; pschwan@uga.edu.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Paula J. Schwanenflugel & Matthew R. Westmoreland

  2. Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, North Adams, MA, USA

    Rebekah George Benjamin

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  1. Paula J. Schwanenflugel
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  2. Matthew R. Westmoreland
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  3. Rebekah George Benjamin
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Correspondence to Paula J. Schwanenflugel.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Frog and Toad have a New Friend

Frog and Toad were good, happy funny friends. They did all kinds of activities in the forest. They would like to walk slowly together at first and then have an increase in their speed. Then, Frog would run with Toad from the woods. They liked to recall all the lovely times they had playing in the forest.

One day, Toad found two paths ahead (PI1-U) and he was not clear where they went. (DS-1) They considered both. Pointing down hill, Frog said, “Let’s try (CS1-M) that.” But Toad wasn’t sure whether to take (CS2-U) this one. It was on this path that Frog (PI1-M) (who can get himself into trouble sometimes) set out anyway.

Toad asked him to (QS1-U) come back. But Frog was gone. Toad repeated, “Please (QS1-M) come back.”

Frog came upon a small green house. It looked empty. There were neat, pretty, colorful flowers growing along a fence. Maybe an artist lived there.

Soon, Toad gave up and followed him. Toad said, “(QS2-M) It doesn’t seem that there is anyone inside. (Y-NQ1 Is anyone inside?”

Frog said (QS2-U) it doesn’t seem that there is. (QS2) Frog had an (EP1-U) idea. Frog said, “We should go and look.” What an (EP1-M) idea!

“We should go and look? I don’t know,” replied Toad. It looked like somebody might live there. “Let’s wait to see if anyone comes home.”

They waited and waited. They watched the animals. Bunnies were jumping. Cats were sleeping in the grass. Mice were making nests under old logs. A blackbird flew by. Frog said, “I almost missed (CS1-U) that.” All the animals were active.

Then, a tall man walked over to them (PI2-M) (and he took them by surprise).

“Hi, I am Toad and this is Frog. What’s your name?” asked Toad. He smiled a (EP-2 U) real big smile.

“I am Big John,” said the man. He saw them gazing at his garden. (Y-NQ-2) “Would you like to see my garden?”

Frog said, “We would like that very much.”

Big John decided which path to take. Big John decided against the path by the garden fence. He didn’t walk on this path. It was wet. In fact, a black bird was taking a bath by the garden fence. So, he chose the path that went through a small greenhouse.

There were many neat, pretty colorful flowers in the garden. It was very artistic. Big John saw Toad looking at his flowers. “Would you like one?” he asked. Big John held up two, a blue one and a yellow one. He held out one flower that was in his garden and said, “Here, take (CS2-M) this one.” He gave Toad the blue one. So, it was in his garden that they all became friends.

“I’m so glad to have new friends,” said Big John. Now, they all had an increase in good friends. Their recall of that day always brought a (EP2-M) real big smile! To this day, they are still good, happy, funny friends. Frog and Toad (PI1-U) who can now find their way to Big John’s house will always visit their friend from the woods

Appendix 2

See Table 4.

Table 4 Correlations among prosody variables
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Schwanenflugel, P.J., Westmoreland, M.R. & Benjamin, R.G. Reading fluency skill and the prosodic marking of linguistic focus. Read Writ 28, 9–30 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-013-9456-1

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