Lexical prosody as an aspect of oral reading fluency

Schwanenflugel, Paula J.; Benjamin, Rebekah George

doi:10.1007/s11145-016-9667-3

Cited by 29 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Schwanenflugel and Benjamin () found that lexical prosody, an aspect of general reading prosody, accounted for a significant increase in variance (13.4%) in standardized reading comprehension scores of third‐grade students, above and beyond reading rate. Valencia et al.…”

Section: Theoretical Rationale and Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relating Reading Comprehension to Oral Reading Performance in the NAEP Fourth‐Grade Special Study of Oral Reading

Sabatini

Wang

O’Reilly

2018

Reading Research Quarterly

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In this secondary analysis study, the authors explored the relations between reading comprehension and oral reading performance in fourth‐grade students, using a data set from the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) special study of oral reading. The data set consisted of 1,713 students randomly selected from the 140,000 fourth graders who participated in the 2002 main NAEP reading assessment. Oral reading was measured by word‐reading accuracy, rate, and prosody. The authors investigated how these variables related to NAEP comprehension across the ability distribution, with a focus on students with low comprehension scores. The results add to the literature in several ways. First, indicators of oral reading fluency continue to explain variation in reading comprehension, even when students had been given multiple opportunities to familiarize themselves with the passage that they read aloud. Second, word‐reading accuracy and reading rate independently explained comprehension scores. Third, the authors observed qualitatively different profiles of fourth‐grade readers with low comprehension scores. Nearly all students with reading rates lower than one standard deviation below the mean also had problems with word recognition, as evidenced by the relatively higher number of word‐reading errors and low prosody ratings. The authors interpret these findings in light of the lexical quality hypothesis and the verbal efficiency theory, which emphasize the importance of word‐level accuracy and automaticity to reading comprehension.

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Section: Theoretical Rationale and Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relating Reading Comprehension to Oral Reading Performance in the NAEP Fourth‐Grade Special Study of Oral Reading

Sabatini

Wang

O’Reilly

2018

Reading Research Quarterly

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“…Indeed, oral reading comprehension is superior to silent reading comprehension until well into middle school for some less fluent readers (Price, Meisinger, Louwerse, & D'Mello, ; Prior et al., ). Our work has also shown that the availability of good oral reading prosody improves young readers’ comprehension, above and beyond the contribution of reading speed and accuracy (Benjamin & Schwanenflugel, ; Schwanenflugel & Benjamin, ; Schwanenflugel, Westmoreland, & Benjamin, ).…”

Section: Defining Fluencymentioning

confidence: 71%

Prosody, Pacing, and Situational Fluency (or Why Fluency Matters for Older Readers)

Kühn¹,

Schwanenflugel²

2018

J Adolescent & Adult Lit

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This commentary challenges the traditional, narrow definition of reading fluency. As part of this reconceptualization, the authors consider the role of stamina, content, and vocabulary in fluent reading. They look at prosody, silent reading, oral reading, and challenging texts (both fiction and informational). Finally, the authors discuss the role that fluency can play in upper grades and how educators can aid its development for older readers.

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“…Correlational analyses examined relations between prosody sensitivity and other individual differences, including exposure to poetry and measures predictive of academic achievement (i.e., reading comprehension, ACT scores, vocabulary scores). Extrapolating from Schwanenflugel and Benjamin's () finding that children with good lexical prosody had good reading comprehension abilities, we reasoned that our college readers with a refined inner voice for the stress alternations in heteronyms would have higher reading comprehension scores and higher scores on the tests used to forecast academic achievement, when compared with students who performed less well on our experimental task. As revealed in experiment 1, we speculated that prosody sensitivity would be related to exposure to poetry.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 76%

“…The first goal of experiment 2 was to investigate whether adult readers represent lexical stress in their inner voices when translating print to a speech‐based code. As previously discussed, third graders showed an understanding of lexical prosody when reading aloud (Schwanenflugel & Benjamin, ). Under the guise of helping an author's tinkering with ways to improve the pleasure of reading prose, participants were asked to judge the helpfulness of the stylistic alterations.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…In 5‐ and 6‐year‐olds, prosody sensitivity uniquely predicted reading, after controlling for vocabulary knowledge, phonological awareness, and morphological awareness (Holliman et al., ). Third graders’ knowledge of lexical prosody when reading aloud from a typical textbook was a significant predictor of oral reading fluency and good reading comprehension (Schwanenflugel & Benjamin, ). For example, young readers displayed knowledge of lexical prosody when they placed stress in the appropriate place for the noun and verb forms of words such as recall and showed syllable stress shifting when suffixes were added (e.g., AR tist vs. ar TIS tic ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Marking Stress ExPLICitly in Written English Fosters Rhythm in the Reader's Inner Voice

Gross

Winegard

Plotkowski

2017

Reading Research Quarterly

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Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of the stylistic alterations appearing in the last line of poems. In experiment 2, silent readers rated the helpfulness of the stylistic alterations appearing in heteronyms embedded in prose. As predicted by linguistic theories, when the stylistic alterations mapped onto the rhythmic pulses of the poems, and the lexically stressed syllables of the heteronyms, silent readers rated these alterations as more helpful compared with the incongruous conditions. In experiment 2, readers' inner voices were more tuned to the prosodic nuances of the first syllable than the second in the bisyllabic heteronyms. This prosodic tuning for the first syllable in a word was likely afforded by the strong tendency for stress to appear word-initially. In addition, the stylistically marked stress was viewed as more helpful in the early half of the sentence, when readers likely recruited more bottom-up processes. In both experiments, prior exposure to poetry was related to a refined prosodic awareness. In experiment 2, exposure to poetry predicted participants' prosody sensitivity, after controlling for the other predictors of academic achievement. The authors' ongoing studies are evaluating whether marking stress explicitly in written English might aid struggling readers and late speakers of English.

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Lexical prosody as an aspect of oral reading fluency

Cited by 29 publications

References 42 publications

Relating Reading Comprehension to Oral Reading Performance in the NAEP Fourth‐Grade Special Study of Oral Reading

Relating Reading Comprehension to Oral Reading Performance in the NAEP Fourth‐Grade Special Study of Oral Reading

Prosody, Pacing, and Situational Fluency (or Why Fluency Matters for Older Readers)

Marking Stress ExPLICitly in Written English Fosters Rhythm in the Reader's Inner Voice

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