The variance that speech prosody explained in reading comprehension scores should not be neglected. Speech prosody seems to facilitate the construction of meaning in written language.

Text reading fluencythe ability to read quickly, accurately and with a natural intonationhas been proposed as a predictor of reading comprehension. In the current study, we examined the role of oral text reading fluency, defined as text reading rate and text reading prosody, as a contributor to reading comprehension outcomes in addition to decoding efficiency and language comprehension. One hundred and six Dutch primary school children from fourth grade participated in this study and were assessed on decoding efficiency, vocabulary, syntactic ability, reading fluency performance and reading comprehension skills. Regression analysis showed that text reading prosody, not text reading rate, explained additional variance in reading comprehension performance when decoding efficiency and language comprehension were controlled for. This result suggests that the inclusion of text reading prosody as an aspect of text reading fluency is justified and that a natural intonation is associated with better comprehension of what is read.The National Curriculum for Primary English (Key stage 2) states that 'To develop understanding and appreciation of literary texts, pupils should be taught to read stories, poems and plays aloud' (National Curriculum for England, 1999, pp. 25-26). In this study, we examined the importance of reading aloud, and what this can tell us about the level of reading comprehension. From the simple view of reading, it is proposed that decoding and language comprehension strongly predict reading comprehension (Gough & Tunmer, 1986;Hoover & Gough, 1990). However, it is also claimed that oral text reading fluency, or the ability to read quickly, accurately and with a natural intonation, contributes to successful reading comprehension. Two issues make it difficult to interpret findings in this area. First, studies so far have used many different definitions of the concept of reading fluency. Second, when evaluating the contribution of reading fluency to reading comprehension performance, other predictors (decoding and language comprehension) have not always been taken into account. In the current study, we investigate whether oral reading fluency defined as text reading rate and text reading prosodypredicts reading comprehension performance over and above predictors specified by the simple view of reading.When children first start to read, their reading will not be very fluent and smooth. The child first has to learn how to decode the written words, that is, to learn how to connect the appropriate sounds to letter combinations. Only when children become more proficient in decoding and learn how to quickly recognise words, their reading performance starts to

Text reading prosody and reading comprehension are related, but both rely on decoding.The aim of the current study was, therefore, to disentangle the contribution of decoding from that of prosody skills. We examined the performance on text reading prosody and speech prosody in fifth-grade children with age-appropriate decoding but weak comprehension. We compared their performance with that of chronological-age controls and younger, comprehension-level controls. We found that poor comprehenders scored significantly below the chronological-age controls on all prosody tasks. Importantly, poor comprehenders scored below the younger, comprehension-level controls on a speech rhythm task. Furthermore, speech prosody explained unique variance in predicting reading comprehension status (poor comprehender vs comprehension-level control). This suggests that poor comprehenders have a delay in prosodic development, with an additional indication of a deficiency in perception and production of speech prosody. The results show that the relation between text reading prosody and reading comprehension does not exclusively rely on decoding. Highlights What is already known about this topic• Text reading prosody has consistently been shown to be related to reading comprehension.• Text reading prosody and reading comprehension both rely on decoding efficiency.• The role of speech prosody in reading comprehension is less widely investigated. What this paper adds• The role of decoding in reading comprehension has been separated from the role of prosody skills in reading comprehension.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

The purpose of this study was to examine the directionality of the relationship between text reading prosody and reading comprehension in the upper grades of primary school. We compared three theoretical possibilities: Two unidirectional relations from text reading prosody to reading comprehension and from reading comprehension to text reading prosody and a bidirectional relation between text reading prosody and reading comprehension. Further, we controlled for autoregressive effects and included decoding efficiency as a measure of general reading skill. Participants were 99 Dutch children, followed longitudinally, from fourth- to sixth-grade. Structural equation modeling showed that the bidirectional relation provided the best fitting model. In fifth-grade, text reading prosody was related to prior decoding and reading comprehension, whereas in sixth-grade, reading comprehension was related to prior text reading prosody. As such, the results suggest that the relation between text reading prosody and reading comprehension is reciprocal, but dependent on grade level.