Speaking to reading in English : investigating the relationship between prosody and reading comprehension with Year 3 children

Abstract

Prosody is often described as the melody of language, and an important linguistic feature to comprehend speech. However, there is a lack of research investigating the relationship between prosody and reading comprehension with children learning to read. Prosody was measured with the PEPS-C 2015 (Peppé, 2015), and investigated in relationship with measures of reading comprehension. This relationship was also analysed with measures representing the aspects of The Simple View of Reading as control variables, which have been well-evidenced as predictors of reading comprehension in prior research. The project worked with 51 children aged between seven and eight in a primary school in the North-East of England. The results suggested that in agreement with previous research prosody does contribute to reading comprehension ability, though this relationship is altered by the presence of the components of the SVR. The exploratory simple mediation analyses further reinforced this. We concluded that children’s understanding and use of prosody in our study was predictive of reading comprehension ability on the tasks. The current project is limited by the cross-sectional design, making conclusions about the causal impact of prosody on reading comprehension not feasible at this time. Further research should follow the relationship between prosody and reading comprehension through a longitudinal study, and could utilise alternative methods (e.g. eye-tracking) to assess more fine-grained aspects of this relationship.