Referring to the "vital parts" of speech that do not appear in print, E. B. Huey (1908/1968) described prosody in reading as "the rise and fall of pitch and inflection, the hurrying here and slowing there, what we have called the melody of speech." In this paper, we discuss the role prosody plays in reading, contextualized in…

Discusses a study which focused on how well elementary children supply appropriate intonation to written sentences and which found that many intonation patterns predictable by syntax had not been mastered even by children who were reading on fourth and fifth grade levels. (JM)

Reports on a study that investigated the relationship between intonation in oral reading and reading comprehension of Black West Indies college students. Concludes that there were no significant relationships and outlines procedures for future research. (FL)

To assess the success of third grade readers in segmenting written text into the ideational groupings judged appropriate by adult readers, 22 students were given two prose selections and told to mark each location where a good reader might pause or take a breath while reading a story out loud. Their pausal locations were then compared to those…

LINGUISTIC INSIGHTS AND METHODS WERE APPLIED TO READING. SIX HYPOTHESES WERE TESTED--(1) THAT EARLY READERS RECOGNIZE WORDS IN CONTEXT WHICH THEY CANNOT RECOGNIZE IN LISTS, (2) THAT THE ABILITY TO READ WITH NATURAL INTONATION IS RELATED TO COMPREHENSION, (3) THAT REGRESSIONS IN READING ARE LARGELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF IMPROVING COMPREHENSION, (4)…

A Rutgers University project attempted to develop and test some ways of creating awareness of the elements of intonation in primary pupils because they found a connection between intonation and certain kinds of reading errors. They also worked out ways to get reading instruction usage from the awareness of juncture, pitch, and stress. They took…

An informal study of four fourth and fifth grade poor readers was undertaken (1) to compare the repeated reading method of instruction with the method of teaching children to recognize lists of words rapidly and (2) to develop an approach that might be helpful in studying the effects of prosodic cues and their contributions to the repeated reading…

A study investigated whether fluency in oral reading, as indicated by proper intonation, could be used as a measure of college students' reading comprehension. The study was designed to look at the three features of intonation--pitch, stress, and juncture--separately and in combination to determine whether any one or a combination of all the…

A large segment of poor readers in elementary school do not supply prosodic features to print; in other words, they do not use pauses, changes in pitch, or differences in emphasis to show their comprehension. Two methods that help children to supply reading intonation involve using phrasally segmented texts and teacher modeling of the correct…

Both writers and readers experience auditory imagery of intonations, accents, and hesitations in written language, and some aspects of this "written language prosody" are made partially overt through punctuation. Two studies explored the relationship between written language prosody and punctuation. The first study asked people to read…

A study was designed to assess the effect of text format on the decoding and comprehension proficiency of third and fifth grade students. Subjects were 36 students at each grade level who completed a battery of comprehension and decoding measures and then read a set of four stories that had been especially constructed for the study. Each story…