Parsing sentences into meaningful phrases and clauses is an essential step in language comprehension, and parsing difficulty is a common reading problem. Prosody (intonation, stress, and rhythm) provides information about phrase and clause boundaries in spoken language that is not available in written language. In an experiment to test whether prosodic information facilitated children's parsing of sentences, 20 above and 20 below average readers in the fourth grade divided sentences into meaningful word groups. There were two presentation conditions: a no-prosody condition in which the sentences were presented in written form only, and a prosody condition in which they were presented in both written and spoken form. The results suggested that below average readers have difficulty parsing sentences when prosodic information is not available, but are able to parse sentences about as well as the above average readers when prosody is available. (Author)