Sentence perception in listening and reading

Abstract

This article examines the role of suprasegmental phonology in speech processing and its implications for reading instruction. The article reviews evidence for the hypothesis that prosodic features cue the boundaries of perceptually functional units (e.g., phrases) in spoken sentences, thus assisting the listener in the immediate segmentation of verbal information. Findings from both comprehension and production studies suggest that the perceptual organization of sentences is guided by syntactic structure as well as by information‐processing requirements related to meaning and memory capacity. It is argued that prosodic cues are not well represented in written text, a fact which may underlie the difficulty that many children experience when learning how to comprehend what they read. The use of phrasally segmented text accompanied by adult modeling of prosodic rendering is suggested as a means for facilitating the child's induction of organization strategies during reading.