Advertisement

Reading and Writing

, Volume 30, Issue 1, pp 143–162 | Cite as

Lexical prosody as an aspect of oral reading fluency

  • Paula J. Schwanenflugel
  • Rebekah George Benjamin
Article
First Online:

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to determine whether the lexical compounding, suffixation, and part of speech aspects of lexical prosody rendered while reading text aloud are predictive of children’s developing oral reading fluency and reading comprehension skills. Ninety-four third grade children were recorded while reading aloud a grade-level passage targeting lexical prosody contrasts related to suffixation, compounding, and part of speech. Children also completed assessments on reading fluency, word reading efficiency, and reading comprehension skills. Prosodic measurements of pitch and amplitude for each syllable of the targeted words, and spoken head word length in ms for targeted compound words, were carried out. Spectrographic analyses indicated that children generally displayed appropriate prosody for each lexical prosody contrast examined. The extent to which children made these prosodic distinctions between syllables was related to their reading fluency and comprehension skills. The study finds that, in the oral reading of connected texts, children’s use of lexical prosody is an aspect of general reading prosody that is predictive of reading fluency.

Keywords

Reading prosody Reading fluency Lexical prosody Oral reading 
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

References

  1. Anastasiou, D., & Protopapas, A. (2015). Difficulties in lexical stress versus difficulties in segmental phonology among adolescents with dyslexia. Scientific Studies of Reading, 19(1), 31–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. Arciuli, J., Monaghan, P., & Seva, N. (2010). Learning to assign lexical stress during reading aloud: Corpus, behavioral, and computational investigations. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 180–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., & Van Rijn, H. (1993). The CELEXlexical database (CD-ROM). University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium.Google Scholar
  4. Behrens, S. J. (1988). The role of the right hemisphere in the production of linguistic stress. Brain and Language, 33(1), 104–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. Benjamin, R. G., & Schwanenflugel, P. J. (2010). Text complexity and oral reading prosody in young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(4), 388–404.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. Bettagere, R. (2010). Differences in acoustic characteristics of stress patterns in American English. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 110(2), 339–347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  7. Blumstein, S., & Goodglass, H. (1972). The perception of stress as a semantic cue in aphasia. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 15(4), 800–806.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2015). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.4.21, http://www.praat.org/.
  9. Bolaños, D., Cole, R. A., Ward, W. H., Tindal, G. A., Hasbrouck, J., & Schwanenflugel, P. J. (2013a). Human and automated assessment of oral reading fluency. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(4), 1142–1151.Google Scholar
  10. Bolaños, D., Cole, R. A., Ward, W. H., Tindal, G. A., & Schwanenflugel, P. J. (2013b). Automatic assessment of expressive oral reading. Speech Communication, 55(2), 221–236.Google Scholar
  11. Breen, M., & Clifton, C. (2011). Stress matters: Effects of anticipated lexical stress on silent reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 64(2), 153–170.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. Calet, N., Defior, S., & Gutierrez-Palma, N. (2013). A cross-sectional study of fluency and reading comprehension in Spanish primary school children. Journal of Research in Reading. doi: 10.1111/1467-9817.12019.Google Scholar
  13. Clin, E., Wade-Woolley, L., & Heggie, L. (2009). Prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness in children’s reading. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104(2), 197–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  14. Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108, 204–256.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. Eimas, P. D., Tarter, V. C., & Miller, J. L. (1981). Dependency relations during the processing of speech (pp. 283–309). In P.D. Eimas, & J.L. Miller (Eds.), Perspectives on the study of speech. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
  16. Fry, D. (1958). Experiments in the perception of stress. Language and Speech, 1, 125–152.Google Scholar
  17. Gutierrez-Palma, N., & Palma-Reyes, A. P. (2007). Stress sensitivity and reading performance in Spanish: A study with children. Journal of Research in Reading, 30, 157–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  18. Hasbrouck, J., & Tindal, G. A. (2006). Oral reading fluency norms: A valuable assessment tool for reading teachers. The Reading Teacher, 59(7), 636–644.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  19. Holliman, A. J., Williams, G. J., Mundy, I. R., Wood, C., Hart, L., & Waldron, S. (2014). Beginning to disentangle the prosody-literacy relationship: A multi-component measure of prosodic sensitivity. Reading and Writing, 27(2), 255–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  20. Jarmulowicz, L. (2006). School-aged children’s phonological production of derived English words. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49(2), 294–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. Jarmulowicz, L., Taran, V. L., & Seek, J. (2012). Metalinguistics, stress accuracy, and word reading: Does dialect matter? Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in the schools, 43(4), 410–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  22. Klauda, S. L., & Guthrie, J. T. (2008). Relationships of three components of reading fluency to reading comprehension. Journal of Educational psychology, 100(2), 310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  23. Kuhn, M. R., Schwanenflugel, P. J., & Meisinger, E. B. (2010). Aligning theory and assessment of reading fluency: Automaticity, prosody, and definitions of fluency. Reading Research Quarterly, 45, 232–253.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. Kuhn, M. R., & Stahl, S. A. (2003). Fluency: A review of developmental and remedial practices. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(1), 3–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  25. Lai, S. A., Benjamin, R. G., Schwanenflugel, P. J., & Kuhn, M. R. (2014). The longitudinal relationship between reading fluency and reading comprehension skills in second grade children. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 30, 116–138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  26. Leslie, L., & Caldwell, J. S. (2011). Qualitative Reading Inventory–5. Boston, MA: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
  27. Lieberman, P. (1960). Some acoustic correlates of word stress in American English. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, 32, 451–454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  28. Lind, A., Hall, L., Breidegard, B., Balkenius, C., & Johansson, P. (2014). Speakers’ acceptance of real-time speech exchange indicates that we use auditory feedback to specify the meaning of what we say. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1198–1205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  29. Miller, J. L. (1978). Interactions in processing segmental and suprasegmental features of speech. Perception and Psychophysics, 24(2), 175–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  30. Miller, J., & Schwanenflugel, P. J. (2006). Prosody of syntactically complex sentences in the oral reading of young children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98, 839–853.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  31. Miller, J., & Schwanenflugel, P. J. (2008). A longitudinal study of the development of reading prosody as a dimension of oral reading fluency in early elementary school children. Reading Research Quarterly, 43, 336–354.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  32. Morton, J., & Jassem, W. (1965). Acoustic correlates of stress. Language and Speech, 8, 159–181.Google Scholar
  33. Prior, S. M., Fenwick, K. D., Saunders, K. S., Ouellette, R., O’Quinn, C., & Harvey, S. (2011). Comprehension after oral and silent reading: Does grade level matter? Literacy Research and Instruction, 50, 183–194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  34. Rasinski, T., Rikli, A., & Johnston, S. (2009). Reading fluency: More than automaticity? More than a concern for the primary grades? Literacy Research and Instruction, 48(4), 350–361.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  35. Richardson, V., Anders, P., Tidwell, D., & Lloyd, C. (1991). The relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practices in reading comprehension instruction. American Educational Research Journal, 28(3), 559–586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  36. Schwanenflugel, P. J., & Benjamin, R. G. (2016). The development of reading prosody and its assessment. In J. Thomson & L. Jarmulowicz (Eds.), Linguistic rhythm and literacy (IASCL series 'Trends in Language Acquisition Research' (TiLAR) (pp. 187–213). Netherlands: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  37. Schwanenflugel, P. J., Westmoreland, M. R., & Benjamin, R. G. (2015). Reading fluency skill and the prosodic marking of linguistic focus. Reading & Writing, 28(1), 9–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  38. Seidenberg, M. S., & McClelland, J. L. (1989). A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. Psychological Review, 96(4), 523–568.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  39. Seva, N., Monaghan, P., & Arciuli, J. (2009). Stressing what is important: Orthographic cues, and lexical stress assignment. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 22, 237–249.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  40. Silbert, N. H. (2012). Syllable structure and integration of voicing and manner of articulation information in labial consonant identification. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 131(5), 4076–4086.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  41. Steele, S. A. (1986). Nuclear accent F0 peak location: Effects of rate, vowel, and number of following syllables. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 80(S1), S51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  42. Torgesen, J. K., Wagner, R., & Rashotte, C. (1999). TOWRE-2 test of word reading efficiency. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.Google Scholar
  43. Tunley, A. (1999). Coarticulatory influences of liquids on vowels in English. Unpublished dissertation, University of Cambridge, England.Google Scholar
  44. Valencia, S. W., Smith, A. T., Reece, A. M., Li, M., Wixson, K. K., & Newman, H. (2010). Oral reading fluency assessment: Issues of construct, criterion, and consequential validity. Reading Research Quarterly, 45(3), 270–291.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  45. Veenendaal, N. J., Groen, M. A., & Verhoeven, L. (2014a). The role of speech prosody and text reading prosody in children’s reading comprehension. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 84, 521–536.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  46. Veenendaal, N. J., Groen, M. A., & Verhoeven, L. (2014b). What oral text reading can reveal about reading comprehension. Journal of Research in Reading. doi: 10.1111/1467-9817.12024.Google Scholar
  47. Vogel, I., & Raimy, E. (2002). The acquisition of compound vs. phrasal stress: The role of prosodic constituents. Journal of Child Language, 29(02), 225–250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  48. Wade-Woolley, (2016). Prosodic and phonemic awareness in children’s reading of long and short words. Reading and Writing, 29, 371–382. doi: 10.1007/s11145-015-9600-1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  49. Whalley, K., & Hansen, J. (2006). The role of prosodic sensitivity in children’s reading development. Journal of Research in Reading, 29(3), 288–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  50. Wood, C. (2006). Metrical stress sensitivity in young children and its relationship to phonological awareness and reading. Journal of Research in Reading, 29, 270–287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  51. Yang, L. -C. (1998). Contextual effects on syllable duration. In Proceedings of the 3rd ESCA/COCOSDA workshop on speech synthesis (pp. 37-42). Jenolan Caves, Australia.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Paula J. Schwanenflugel
    • 1
  • Rebekah George Benjamin
    • 2
  1. 1.Department of Educational Psychology, Cognitive Science, and LinguisticsUniversity of GeorgiaAthensUSA
  2. 2.Department of PsychologyHuntington UniversityHuntingtonUSA

Personalised recommendations

Cite article

Buy options