Purpose: A rich body of evidence has illuminated the importance of caregivers' use of prosody in facilitating young children's language development. Although caregiver-child shared reading has been repeatedly linked to children's language skills, caregiver prosody during shared reading interactions (i.e., oral reading expressiveness) has been…

Several cross-linguistic studies found that oral reading prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in reading aloud) correlates with reading comprehension. As an extension, the present study aimed to examine the relationship between oral reading prosody and beyond word-level reading abilities in tone languages like Mandarin. One hundred and nine…

Variability in oral reading fluency (ORF), an indicator of foundational reading skills, has been linked to characteristics of texts. Such "text-based variability" in ORF has been traditionally attributed to text complexity, but substantial text-based variability has still been observed after accounting for text complexity. We consider…

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…

The purpose of this study was to investigate if a group of sixth-grade low achievement language minority (LM) students' reading skills could be improved by an intervention designed to train reading fluency, a critical component of reading development, defined as integrating speed and accuracy (reading rate) as well as prosody. The study included…

The aim of this study was to illuminate the relationships between the three components of oral reading fluency, sustained attention, working memory, and text comprehension in typically developing third-grade students (N = 140). The findings of hierarchical regression analysis reveal that speed, accuracy, and prosody together significantly…

The present work reviews the current knowledge of the development of reading prosody, or reading aloud with expression, in young children. Prosody comprises the variables of timing, phrasing, emphasis and intonation that speakers use to convey meaning. We detail the subjective rating scales proposed as a means of assessing performance in young…

We investigated the dimensionality of various indicators of reading prosody, and the relations of word reading and listening comprehension to the identified dimension(s) of reading prosody, using longitudinal data from Grades 1 to 3. A total of 371 English-speaking children were assessed on oral text reading, word reading, and listening…

It is shown that a particular class of pauses taken in both read and composed speech obey allometric laws such that mean pause length predicts body size. The pauses in this class have durations that roughly span 250 ms to 1,000 ms and are taken to mark grammatical and prosodic boundaries. A theory of pause allometry is developed based on the…

Purpose: The Motor Planning Theory of Prosody and reading prosody research indicate that "out of the blue" oral reading, as practiced in clinical and research settings, invokes surface rather than covert prosody, particularly when readers are recorded, less skilled, and/or speech impaired. Warm-up is not considered in passage reading for…

Purpose: The study aimed to examine whether oral reading prosody--the use of acoustic features (e.g., pitch and duration variations) when reading passages aloud--predicts reading fluency and comprehension abilities. Method: We measured vocabulary, syntax, word reading, reading fluency (including rate and accuracy), reading comprehension (in Grades…

The aim of this study was to determine whether the reliability of raters was provided by assessing reading prosody using the Multidimensional Fluency Scale (MDFS). The study was completed with a cross-sectional design, and in line with this, the prosodic reading skills of 41 fifth-grade students were rated by elementary school classroom teachers…

Educators struggle to assess various aspects of reading in valid and reliable ways. Whether it is comprehension, phonological awareness, vocabulary, or phonics, determining appropriate assessments is challenging across grade levels and student abilities. Also challenging is measuring aspects of fluency: rate, accuracy, and prosody. This article…

Background: In languages with lexical stress, reading aloud must include stress assignment. Stress information sources across languages include word-final letter sequences. Here, we examine whether such sequences account for stress assignment in Greek and whether this is attributable to absolute rules involving accenting morphemes or to…

Over the past two decades, reading fluency has been increasingly recognized as an important instructional variable for success in reading. Yet, this has not always been the case. This article presents a historical review of the nature and role of fluency instruction in the United States. The roots of oral reading fluency began in an age when texts…