Segmenting Texts Into Meaningful Word Groups: Beginning Readers’ Prosody and Comprehension

Abstract

It was hypothesized that prosodic reading facilitates beginning readers’ comprehension by allowing them to segment the text into meaningful word groups. Two prosodic features of the oral reading of second-grade students were considered: lack of inappropriate pauses and attention to punctuation. To examine the unique contribution of these features to reading comprehension, fluency (speed and accuracy of reading) and vocabulary were controlled. As expected, both prosodic features were significantly related to comprehension, jointly explaining as much variance as fluency. Accordingly, it might be counterproductive to encourage reading speed and accuracy at the expense of prosody.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Simon Pesant for his help in elaborating the prosodic reading coding procedure, and Roxanne Carboni, Véronique Dupéré, Isabelle Plante, and Jessica Toste for their input.

FUNDING

This research was supported by the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network (Grant No. 27061201), with additional support from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (Grant No. 125020).