Analysis of the development of reading prosody as an element of children's developing reading fluency

This study examines the development of reading prosody, specifically, linguistic focus prosody as an element of reading by recording the readings of 120 third grade students from Georgia and New Jersey. Spectrographs were used to examine how the students marked linguistic through the use of pitch, duration, and amplitude. The linguistic focus features being examined were exclamation, quotations, contrastive stress, and parentheticals. More fluent readers marked contrastive stress and exclamations with higher pitch and increased amplitude, which was expected based on the previous research. Fluent readers also used higher pitch as a marker of quotations. Longer duration was only used as a marker for exclamations and even showed an unexpected directionality where unmarked words had a longer duration. The participants generally did not understand parentheticals, and a majority of the parentheticals had to be recorded as missing and a statistical analysis could not be performed.