Text Complexity Prosody

Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers
Rebekah George Benjamin, Paula J. Schwanenflugel

University of Georgia, Athens, USA
ABSTR ACT
The purpose of the study was to examine the impact of text difficulty on the oral reading prosody of young children. Fluency in reading is ideally determined by measuring rate, accuracy, and prosodic qualities in the oral reading of children. Spectrographic measurements of four prosodic variablessentence-final F0 change, intonation contour, intrasentential pausing, and ungrammatical pausingwere carried out on the oral readings of second-grade students (N=90) of an easy and a difficult text. Standardized measures of reading fluency (i.e., measuring only rate and accuracy) and reading comprehension were also given. Text difficulty had an impact on childrens oral reading on three of the four prosody variables, and fluent children read more expressively than less fluent children. Prosody measured from the more difficult text was found to be more closely related to other aspects of fluency than prosody measured from the easy text. Additionally, prosody measured from the difficult text served as an independent predictor of comprehension skills once rate and accuracy were controlled for, whereas prosody from the easy text did not. It is proposed that good reading prosody is used by children to assist in comprehending the more difficult text.
ince Clay and Imlachs (1971) groundbreaking look at the development of reading prosody in the oral reading of 7-year-old children, research into the relationship among prosody, fluency, and comprehension has been fruitful. In 2000, the National Reading Panel defined fluent readers as those who can read text with speed, accuracy, and proper expression (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [NICHD], 2000, p. 3-1). Whereas the first two components of this definition (speed and accuracy) require relatively simple measures for assessment, defining and measuring proper expression has proven more difficult and received less empirical attention. Proper expression is a general term that may be viewed as synonymous with appropriate reading prosodysimply understood as the musical quality of language. As yet, prosodic units for measurement in oral reading research have not been definitively determined (Smith, 2004). Although prosody is a quality that most listeners readily use to distinguish one readers skill from anothers, its actual function in childrens literacy development is still unclear. In most studies, the term fluency is used interchangeably with reading rate (which is usually measured as words correct per minute and takes into account both speed and accuracy), and, for simplicity, we will generally do so here, with the understanding that our goal is to determine the role of prosody distinct from reading rate within the National Reading Panels definition of fluency and within the development of
skilled reading in general. Kuhn, Schwanenflugel, and Meisinger (2010) have argued that prosody is rightfully part of the definition of reading fluency. Recently, positive strides have been made in determining the function of prosody in literacy development (Klauda & Guthrie, 2008; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Rasinski, Rikli, & Johnston, 2009; Schwanenflugel et al., 2006; Schwanenflugel, Hamilton, Kuhn, Wisenbaker, & Stahl, 2004). Kuhn and Stahl (2003) identified two theories to explain the now wellknown correlation between fluency and comprehension: one focuses on the contribution of reading automaticity to comprehension, and the other on the contribution of prosody. They argued that fluency, defined as not only accuracy and automaticity of individual word reading but also prosodic rendering of the text, is needed for children to comprehend fully.
What Is Prosody?
Prosody is indicated by the variations in loudness, duration, pitch, and pausing (Couper-Kuhlen, 1986) found in speech. Loudness is often modified to place stress on a particular word, phrase, or exclamation; duration can involve rhythm, vowel length, and even the lengthening of an entire word for emphasis; pitch is measured in hertz and is also called intonation or fundamental frequency (F0); pausing is also used for emphasis, to
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divide an utterance into its major syntactic components, and to signal turn-taking in dialogue. Prosodic features are correlated in marking particular linguistic features (Cooper & Paccia-Cooper, 1980) and can even engage in cue-trading, in which one feature is taken up by another (Beach, 1991). For sentence prosody, on which this study focused, declarative sentences generally have an intonation contour with an initial rise, followed by a declination at major syntactic boundaries (Ladd, 1984; Wichmann, 1994). Uncertainty, such as indicated by yesno questions, is expressed by variations from this pattern (Himmelmann & Ladd, 2008; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006). Yet, although prosody tends to follow basic syntactic units, there is no guaranteed predictability between prosody and syntax, as prosody is often used to convey other aspects of meaning (Wichmann, 1994). Studies have demonstrated that important features of prosody are related in speech and text, ranging from word (Ashby, 2006; Ashby & Clifton, 2005; GutirrezPalma & Reyes, 2007) to sentence (Cooper & PacciaCooper, 1980) to macrolevel topicality (Smith, 2004; Wennerstrom, 2001). One of the goals in learning to read fluently is to learn to read in a way that sounds like spontaneous speech. However, it may be only voice professionals, such as newscasters and actors, who truly accomplish this (Esser, 1988). Even among highly fluent adults, read speech differs from spontaneous speech (Esser, 1988; Wichmann, 1994). Read speech has fewer endof-sentence rises, pauses, and very low pitch ranges (Esser, 1988; Howell & Kadi-Hanifi, 1991) as well as less noticeable marking of minor syntactic boundaries (Blaauw, 1994). Read speech is cleaner, faster, and has less variability than speaking prosody (Blaauw, 1994; Howell & Kadi-Hanifi, 1991). Indeed, there is enormous prosodic consistency among adults reading the same text (Schwanenflugel et al., 2004).
Measuring the Development of Reading Prosody

Interest in determining how and whether to measure prosodys impact on the reading process is increasing. One method that researchers have used to assess prosodic awareness in children has been to administer parsing tests, in which children manually segment written text into syntactic clusters. Reading texts aloud to children with exaggerated prosody appears to facilitate this process (Snow, Coots, & Smith, 1982), but parsing texts may not relate particularly well to reading prosody. Another method of assessing reading prosody is rating scales of oral reading, in which quick and accurate reading is often conflated with measurement
of expression. For example, a National Assessment of Educational Progress study (Pinnell et al., 1995) included a fluency scale that distinguished four levels of skill, with Level 1 describing reading as primarily word-byword. Occasional two-word or three-word phrases may occurbut these are infrequent and/or they do not preserve meaningful syntax (p. 15), and Level 4 requiring students to read with meaningful phrasing, appropriate representation of syntax, and interpretive expression. Not only does this level of the rating scale encompass a broad range of skills, but also only a small percentage (10%) of fourth graders could read at Level 4, according to a more recent NAEP study (Daane, Campbell, Grigg, Goodman, & Oranje, 2005), and an even smaller percentage (8%) at Level 1. Thus, only two levels related to the imperfect prosody typical of most children acquiring fluency. Therefore, rating systems like this one may not adequately capture the expressive variation inherent in developing readers. Regardless, studies using various prosody rating schemes have found a relationship between reading skill and reading prosody in children learning to read (Klauda & Guthrie, 2008; Rasinski et al., 2009; Yldz, Yldrm, Ates, & etinkaya, 2009; Young & Bowers, 1995). A second issue with regard to rating schemes is that expressiveness measured in this global way is likely to be affected by the many oral miscues present in childrens oral reading. This would make it unclear whether low ratings represent just poor decoding or true wordby-word reading (Bear, 1992). Cowie, Douglas-Cowie, and Wichmann (2002) have suggested that one might be able rate expressiveness independently from fluency, which then might reveal possible interactions. In support of this, they found a group of children rated as highly fluent who were not expressive at all, but dysfluent children were never expressive. Thus, in any rating scheme of reading prosody, it will be important to ensure that one has truly distinguished expressiveness from other impacts on childrens oral reading. Modern technology affords us the opportunity to make more precise and objective measurements of reading prosody by using spectrographic techniques. Spectrographically measuring prosody allows one to eliminate inaccurate readings from the measure of prosody. Recent studies have examined the specific relationship between prosody and skilled reading by using spectrographic measures of reading prosody at the word and phrase level (Whalley & Hansen, 2006), and sentence or passage level (Cowie et al., 2002; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004). Schwanenflugel and colleagues (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004) found that second- and third-grade students who read quickly and accurately were more likely to read with good prosody than children who read slowly, albeit
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accurately (see also Dowhower, 1987). They discovered that good readers made fewer and shorter intrasentential pauses and larger sentence-final declinations, and were more adultlike in their intonation (i.e., pitch) contour than children with poorer decoding skills. Miller and Schwanenflugel (2006), in accord with Chafe (1988), observed that skilled readers were less likely to pause at commas than were less skilled readers. Further, Miller and Schwanenflugel (2008) found that children with a more adultlike intonation contour in first and second grades were more likely to read fluently in third grade.
The Relationship Between Prosody and Comprehension

The National Reading Panel (NICHD, 2000) stated that fluency (defined as rate, accuracy, and expression) was a critical factor in comprehension. Several studies have found a significant connection between word decoding speed and comprehension (Gough, Hoover, & Peterson, 1996; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004, 2006), connected text reading rate and comprehension (Fuchs, Fuchs, Hosp, & Jenkins, 2001; Klauda & Guthrie, 2008; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006; Riedel, 2007), and observed long-term relationships between reading rate, prosody, and later comprehension skill (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2008). If, as already demonstrated, prosody is an integral aspect of reading fluency, then prosodys role in comprehension may be important as well. Dowhower (1987, 1991) noted that as children improve in rate, accuracy, and comprehension, they also tend to read with greater prosody. Prosody, then, seems to either promote comprehension or act as an indicator of comprehension. Although prosody and reading rate are easily connected, some research using spectrographic measurement of prosody has suggested that the contribution of prosody to comprehension may be small to nonexistent (Cowie et al., 2002; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004). Using more specific syntactic criteria to explore the relationships between reading rate, prosody, and comprehension, Miller and Schwanenflugel (2006) were able to find a significant and sizable independent relationship between pitch changes and comprehension skills but not between pauses and comprehension. Salient pitch declination at the end of declarative sentences and pitch rise at the end of yesno questions corresponded with high reading comprehension skills. However, Miller and Schwanenflugel (2008) found that changes in pausal intrusions between first and second grade successfully predicted comprehension skill in third grade, and an adultlike intonation contour was significantly linked with reading comprehension in third grade. This research demonstrated the possibility of certain prosod-
ic features serving as both contemporaneous and early predictors of comprehension skills. Klauda and Guthrie (2008) built on these findings to include passage-level expressiveness ratings. Fifthgrade students completed a battery of assessments measuring word reading rate, passage-level fluency, and reading comprehension, among other skills. Passagelevel fluency scores, in this case, were an expressiveness measure using a 4-point scale of overall passage expressiveness (1 = reading evokes no mood or tone; 4 = reading creates mood or tone in accord with the authors intention). The authors found that students who comprehended the text tended also to score high on this measure of passage-level expressiveness. Although Klauda and Guthrie (2008) used a rating scale to judge prosody (which might be influenced by child miscues) rather than spectrographic measurements, their finding is consistent with our understanding of prosody in English: Prosody interacts with both syntax at the phrase level and semantics at the passage level (Esser, 1988). Still, fifth graders are fundamentally more fluent than the first though third graders studied by Schwanenflugel and her colleagues, so it is unclear whether younger readers are as influenced by passage-level prosody characteristics as older children. Moreover, because rating scales would likely be influenced by child miscues, as noted earlier, it is unclear whether effects determined by ratings are truly attributable to expressiveness and not other factors.
The Impact of Text Difficulty

As children progress in reading skills, they develop the capacity to read more complex texts, which generally have heavier comprehension requirements than the simple texts of early reading, due in part to unfamiliar vocabulary and longer sentences present in more difficult texts (Clay & Imlach, 1971; OConnor et al., 2002). To date, studies on reading prosody have measured its effects using a single, generally simple text. Clay and Imlach (1971) used four stories of increasing structural complexity and sentence length in their ratings study of the development of reading prosody, but they did not analyze the effects of complexity. However, psychometric measures of fluency, such as the Gray Oral Reading Test (GORT, 2001), establish fluency levels by evaluating changes in reading rate and accuracy as children read increasingly complex texts. Currently, we know little about the effect that text complexity has on reading prosody. One possibility is that text complexity will cause prosody to erode. This point of view might be anticipated from the automaticity theory of reading (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974). Presumably, more complex texts require a greater
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cognitive load than simple ones, because they have longer, more complex sentences and lower frequency words. Reading complex texts may require children to use greater attentional capacity to decipher the message, resulting in less capacity for prosodic renderings. A second possibility is that text complexity might actually benefit reading prosody. Some researchers have suggested that prosody may support the maintenance of an auditory sequence in working memory (Frazier, Carlson, & Clifton, 2006; Swets, Desmet, Hambrick, & Ferreira, 2007), allowing the sequence to be analyzed for further processing (Koriat, Greenberg, & Kreiner, 2002). Thus, the prosody as measured from more complex texts may be more related to comprehension than the prosody as measured from less complex texts, because they require the cognitive assistance that prosody provides. There is some preliminary evidence for this point of view from a study by Young and Bowers (1995), who examined the relationship between parsing and text difficulty. Using the Allington (1983) reading fluency scale, the researchers found that fluency ratings of poor readers declined significantly as they read more complex texts, whereas the ratings of average readers did not change at all. However, Young and Bowers found that the parsing ability of children from both skill groups actually increased as a function of text difficulty. Assuming that parsing is at least somewhat related to prosody, this result suggests that prosody might not erode as children read more complex texts. However, Young and Bowerss measure of parsing was not obtained from oral reading but, rather, a measure of metalinguistic knowledge about parsing. Currently, the impact that text complexity exerts on childrens reading prosody is unknown.
to discern which type of text better predicted reading skill outcomes. Of the studys two goals, the main one was to determine whether text difficulty impacts childrens prosodic renderings of the text and which prosodic features were impacted. We also wished to discern whether childrens fluency (as measured by standardized assessments) influenced their prosody during the reading of easy and difficult texts. If so, it would help us discern whether prosody taken from difficult texts or texts children can read easily is a better indicator of childrens standardized assessments of fluency level. The second goal was to determine whether prosody taken from a difficult versus an easy text enhances the ability to predict both fluency and reading comprehension skill. If so, then it has implications for the measurement of basic reading skills.
Method
Participants
The study participants were 90 second-grade students (57% female, 43% male; mean age = 8 years 2 months, SD = 4 months; 50% European American, 32% African American, 10% Hispanic American, 4% Asian American, 2% other, and 1% unknown ethnicity) who were part of a larger study on the development of reading fluency and had participated in a broader intervention study that was unrelated to the present research. The children attended one of five schools (four in Georgia [83% of the sample] and one in New Jersey [17%]). Although students from multiple ethnic backgrounds and two different geographical areas of the United States participated, previous research that included these participants found no significant prosodic differences between the groups for purposes of the present study (Schwanenflugel et al., 2004). Only children not receiving special services for dual-language learners and who were able to read the difficult targeted passage from the GORT (1992, 2001) were included in the study, so neither primary language nor decoding errors would be confounded, and comparisons between an easy and a difficult passage could be made. All children had parental consent for participating in the study and assented to their own participation. Twenty adult participants (70% female, 30% male; 70% European American, 30% African American) were also recruited for this study to develop an adult fundamental frequency intonation contour baseline to which childrens intonation contour could be compared. The adult sample was matched as closely as possible to the second-grade sample in general demographics to control for possible regional differences in reading styles, and the sample was balanced among working and middle class participants. Of the adults, 85% had been raised
The Purpose of the Study

The present study examined the role of text difficulty on the prosody of childrens oral reading. The prosodic measures of interest to us are those that have been found previously to be predictive of comprehension (i.e., sentence-final pitch change, adultlike intonation contour, and number of intersentential pauses; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004). The prosodies of second-grade students readings of easy and difficult texts were spectrographically analyzed and compared to determine the effects of text complexity on prosody. These spectrographic measurements were then used as predictors of standardized measures of fluency (as determined by the GORT, 1992, 2001) and comprehension (as determined by the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test [WIAT], 1992)
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and currently lived in northeast Georgia, and the remaining 15% were from New Jersey. All had been raised within shopping distance of one of the groups of child participants and were recruited through university ties or simply by door-to-door solicitation among area businesses. Adults received a childrens book as an incentive for participating in the study.
tests were reported as ranging from 0.44 to 0.90 in the third edition and 0.39 to 0.89 in the fourth edition.
Reading Comprehension Assessment

The Reading Comprehension subtest of the WIAT (1992) was administered to obtain an independent measure of the students reading comprehension skill. This subtest consists of a series of printed passages, each of which increases in difficulty, followed by a question presented and responded to orally. The subtest contains both literal and inferential comprehension question types. The children were instructed to read a passage, listen to the question presented by the examiner, and then respond orally in their own words. Once a child missed four consecutive questions, the test was discontinued. This test measures reading comprehension as childrens ability to answer questions about the text, a skill that many teachers consider a key indicator of reading comprehension (Richardson, Anders, Tidwell, & Lloyd, 1991). The raw score, determined by the number of questions answered correctly, was converted to a standard score based on age, which then served as an indicator of reading comprehension skill, henceforth referred to as WIAT-RC. The split-half reliability coefficient for this age range has a mean of 0.92, and the validity estimates fall between 0.73 and 0.78.
General Assessments and Procedures

For children, formal reading assessments were administered during the spring term of second grade. Children were administered standardized tests of reading fluency, word reading efficiency, and reading comprehension, counterbalanced so that half the participants received oral reading fluency and word reading efficiency measures in the first half of the battery, and half received the reading comprehension assessment first. All assessments were carried out by testers trained to a standard of 100% agreement with a trained school psychologist. All were tested in a quiet location in their schools.
Word Reading Efficiency Assessment

To obtain an independent estimate of word reading efficiency, we administered children the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE) Sight Word Efficiency subtest (1999), which assesses the number of real words correctly read from a list within 45 seconds. Children were assessed using TOWRE Form A; the subtest raw score was converted to a standard score based on age, as directed by the examiners manual. Testretest reliability calculated for children ages 69 years is reported as 0.97 in the manual. Furthermore, concurrent validity estimates reported in the manual have a coefficient of 0.94 for second-grade students.
Reading Prosody Assessment and Procedures

Prosodic measurements were carried out on the two selected target passages from the GORT: passage 1 from the GORT-3 or passage 3 (the same passage) from GORT-4, henceforth the easy passage, and passage 3 of the GORT-3 or passage 6 (the same passage) from the GORT-4, henceforth the difficult passage. According to the GORT-4 examiners manual (Wiederholt & Bryant, 2001), In addition to the readability levels, the stories were ordered based on (a) the raw score means on the comprehension questions made by the normative sample, and (b) the conversion score averages on rate and accuracy on the individuals on the normative sample (p. 76). The technical manual also notes that the syntax in the stories progresses from more simple to more complex. The easy passage was selected because it was highly decodable and allowed for prosodic measurement in a context with few decoding errors. This story was introduced with the following instructions: This story is about two people in a family. Read the story to find out what happens to them. Our own readability analyses using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula (Flesch, 1948) and the Spache readability index (Spache, 1953) yielded an average estimated grade level of 1.97, approximately the grade level of children in the study.
Oral Reading Fluency Assessment

To measure childrens oral reading fluency, they were given the GORT (1992, 2001) to assess students skill in reading connected text. The discontinue rule for the assessment was consistent with that specified in the examiners manuals. The test presents children a series of passages of increasing difficulty to read aloud. As these children were participants in a larger longitudinal study, 36% of them were administered Form A of the GORTs third edition, and 64% were given Form A of the fourth edition. Passages were presented as formatted in the student book. Raw scores for rate were converted to standard scores based on age, as directed by the respective examiners manuals. The authors of the test in the GORTs fourth edition reported an internal consistency reliability of 0.90 and testretest reliability of 0.95 for children in this age range for rate scores (reliabilities for the third edition ranged from 0.82 to 0.92). Validity estimates compared with other reading skills
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The passage was 52 words long and consisted of seven sentences: three simple declaratives, a salutation quotative, a yesno question quotative, and two declarative quotatives. The difficult passage was selected because the examiners manuals indicated that its readability was above grade level for the participants and, thus, would allow for a comparison of prosodic measurements with a more difficult text. Our own readability analyses using the Flesh-Kincaid grade level formula and the Spache readability index yielded an average estimated grade level of 3.79. The passage was 100 words long and consisted of nine sentences: seven simple declaratives and two complex declaratives. The second passage was introduced as follows: This story is about people doing something together. Read the story to find out what they are doing. For both passages, examiners directed students to read the passages as quickly and as well as they could. Readings from the children were obtained using either a Sony TCD-D100 digital audiotape cassette recorder or Sound Devices USBPre 1.5 microphone interface for computer audio. A Sony ECM-717 one-point stereo microphone was used with both recording devices. Additionally, shareware versions of the GoldWave (GoldWave Inc., 2004) and Audacity (version 1.2.6; Audacity Developer Team, 2008) digital audio editors were used to create individual WAV files for prosody analysis. Background interference was reduced using noise reduction procedures, and prosodic analysis was carried out using Praat (version 5.0.38; Boersma & Weenink, 2008), a free software program that analyzes, synthesizes, and manipulates digital sound and speech data. For the adults, only the two targeted passages from the study were provided for recording. The adults were instructed to read the stories aloud, first the easy passage then the difficult one. These readings were recorded in a quiet area of their homes or workplaces on an Olympus WS-110 WMA digital voice recorder.
Measurement of Prosodic Features

Based on recent studies examining reading prosody (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004), we examined prosodic features that were expected to be predictive of reading comprehension. Among these features, we analyzed for the number of pausal intrusions within a passage (i.e., intrasentential pausing) and the fundamental frequency (F0) change at the ends of sentences. We also analyzed for childrens similarity to an averaged adult intonation contour for each of the two stories. In addition to the measurement methods replicated from previous studies, we also calculated a measure of ungrammatical pausing. Pauses can be of various types (e.g., difficult decoding, parsing)
and can have different roles, such as parsing complex sentences by cognitively bracketing key informational units, so a more complete semantic analysis can be carried out (Koriat et al., 2002). We wished to distinguish inappropriate pausing (i.e., ungrammatical) from these more grammatical types of pauses. The first three sentences of each passage were chosen for prosodic measurement. In the first passage, the first three sentences were declarative and free of internal punctuation, such as commas, and quotatives, both of which might direct intrasentential pausing. In the second, more difficult passage, commas were only used in one sentence, to separate items in a list, which prior research has shown tend not to be marked by adults (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006). This method allowed us to target text that was fairly uniform linguistically. Additionally, all prosodic measurements were taken using Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2008). Sentence-final F0 change was measured by isolating the target area on the spectrograph and measuring the pitch change in hertz from the final pitch peak to the end of the sentence. Magnitude of F0 declination was determined by subtracting the final pitch peak from the peak fundamental frequency. Measurements were taken on the three basic declarative sentences at the beginning of each of the texts, and the mean difference in F0 was used as an indicator of sentence-final F0 declination for each passage. In some cases, creaky voice was observed in recording. Creaky voice is a result of irregular vocal fold vibration and can occur at any pitch. However, the result is that the pitch drops approximately two octaves below normal frequency. Thus, end-of-sentence prosody indicating creaky voice was not included as data (i.e., scored as missing), as this is generally not considered a valid indicator of F0. In these cases, sentence-final F0 declination was based on the remaining sentences. Two children (2.2% of the sample) displayed creaky voice at the ends of all sentences from the passage, and their pitch change was imputed. Henceforth, averaged sentence-final pitch change measurement from the easier text is referred to as easy sentence-final F0, and from the more difficult text as difficult sentence-final F0. Intrasentential pausal intrusions were counted by isolating the temporal space between the end of a word and the start of the following word. Pauses exceeding 100 ms were counted as pausal intrusions (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008). Because the number of words contained in the first three sentences of each passage differed, the raw number of pausal intrusions per passage was divided by the total number of intrasentential pausal intrusion opportunities per passage, resulting in a pause proportion per passage for each participant. Henceforth, pausal intrusion measurement
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from the easier text is referred to as easy pause ratio, and from the more difficult text as difficult pause ratio. Ungrammatical pause ratio was measured by taking the ratio of each childs number of ungrammatical pauses to total pauses. Major syntactic boundaries (i.e., clause boundaries), breaks between items in a list, and phrasal boundaries at which a reader might reasonably pause as a result of a minor topic shift or transition were considered grammatical for our purposes. The pauses of interest were those that did not fit into these grammatical categories. If a child never paused midsentence during the reading, as prior research has suggested is the most typical pattern of fluent children (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006), his or her ungrammatical pause ratio was defined as 0, whereas a child who struggled significantly through the textpausing between half the wordsmight have a pause ratio of 0.5. Henceforth, this ratio of ungrammatical pauses to total intrasentential pauses from both the easy and difficult texts is referred to as easy ungrammatical pause and difficult ungrammatical pause, respectively. To determine the intonation contour for each child and adult, each word in the first three sentences of each story was isolated, and its vocalic nucleus (i.e., the voiced portion of the word, which produces F0) was measured. So that comparisons between the children and adults could be determined, an average F0 was obtained for each word by averaging over the 20 adult participants. This method is consistent with previous studies (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004) and was verified as suitable by obtaining a Cronbachs a reliability score across adults for each story (a = 0.90 for the easy story; a = 0.95 for the difficult story), suggesting that adults shared a similar intonation contour while reading the stories. The same vocalic nucleus measurement was carried out on the oral readings of the child participants, and each childs intonation contour was correlated (Pearsons r) with the averaged adult contour, resulting in an adultlike prosody score for each child. Henceforth, this index of adultlike prosody measurement from the easier text is referred to as easy F0 contour, and from the more difficult text as difficult F0 contour.
analyzed for data normality and found that all variables met standard criteria for normality and had acceptable values of skewness and kurtosis. Additionally, the scale scores from the GORT were converted to standard scores so that all standardized test scores were on the same scale. The standardized scores reflected a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. As evident in Table 1, however, the children in this sample scored higher, on average, than their peers. This result was expected, as only children who had reached the predetermined benchmark (i.e., the difficult text chosen from the GORT) could be included in the present study. The range, mean, and standard deviation for each variable can be found in Table 1. Analyses were carried out in multiple steps, each addressing one of the major goals of the present research. The first goal was to determine whether text difficulty impacted childrens prosodic renderings of the text and whether childrens fluency skill played a role in their prosodic reading of easy and difficult texts. The second goal was to determine if prosodic measurements from a more difficult text were more predictive of both standardized measures of fluency and reading comprehension than prosody as measured from an easy text.
The Impact of Text Difficulty on Reading Prosody

To address the first goal, we carried out a simple ANOVA comparing each prosody variable taken from the easy text with prosody from the difficult text. Rather than use a MANOVA approach combining all prosody variables, we did this because we had substantive interest in determining which of the four prosodic variables were influenced by text difficulty (cf. Jaccard & GuilamoRamos, 2002). However, we used a Bonferroni adjustment for a standard a of 0.05 (or 0.05/4 = 0.0125). Sentence-final F0 was similar for easy and difficult texts (F(1,89) = 2.73, p = .102), but childrens F0 contour became more adultlike when reading the difficult text compared with the easy text (F(1,89) = 17.77, p < .001, partial h2 = 0.166). Children made proportionally more pauses when reading the difficult text than reading the easy text (F(1,89) = 133.44, p < .001, partial h2 = 0.60), but these pauses became less ungrammatical (F(1,89) = 8.30, p = .005, partial h2 = 0.085). Thus, three out of the four prosody variables were affected by reading the more difficult text, and in only one case (i.e., pause ratio) was that impact negative.
Results
Prior to analysis, the data were inspected graphically for prosodic outliers. We found evidence of two outlier measurements among the childrens F0 contour scores for the easy text. However, when further tests were performed, it was determined that including these outliers did not demonstrate any marked effect on statistical outcomes, and because the data had been accurately measured and recorded, they were retained. We also
The Impact of Fluency on the Reading Prosody of Easy and Difficult Texts
A single score was calculated that would serve as a general indicator of fluency skilloperationally defined as rate and accuracy for the present studybased on
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Table 1. Descriptive Statistics of Childrens Fluency, Comprehension, and Prosody Measurements

Tests and measurement results GORT-3 and GORT-4 WIAT-RC TOWRE Easy sentence-final F0 Difficult sentence-final F0 Easy pause ratio Difficult pause ratio Easy ungrammatical pause ratio Difficult ungrammatical pause ratio Easy F0 contour Difficult F0 contour Minimum 75 81 89 -24.22 -46.21 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 -0.044 0.270 Maximum 150 154 145 106.15 107.87 0.773 0.967 1.00 1.00 0.884 0.911 Mean 109.33 111.59 112.79 41.5977 34.7100 0.18131 0.36037 0.7012 0.5896 0.62367 0.70678 Standard deviation 13.537 15.241 11.706 26.67837 31.09564 0.159436 0.253362 0.34138 0.25843 0.177167 0.149671
Note. Difficult=difficult text from the GORT; easy=easy text from the GORT; F0 contour=adultlike prosody score based on intonation contour; GORT=Gray Oral Reading Test; sentence-final F0=average sentence-final F0 change; TOWRE=Test of Word Reading Efficiency sight-word subtest; WIAT-RC=Wechsler Individual Achievement Tests Reading Comprehension subtest.
childrens standardized test performance using the GORT and TOWRE scores. The childrens standard scores on GORT and TOWRE were averaged, henceforth called fluency skill (Schwanenflugel et al., 2004). The resulting fluency skill scores were used to divide the children into low (range = 82.5106.5), middle (range = 107116.5), and high (range = 117147.5) fluency skill groups. We then ran a 3(fluency skill) 2(text difficulty) ANOVA for each of the four prosody variables. The prosody means for each group on each passage are represented in Figure 1. The sentence-final F0 change omnibus test revealed a significantly large effect of fluency group (F(2,87) = 12.70, p < .001, partial h2 = 0.226), as expected. There was a nonsignificant medium-sized effect of text difficulty (F(1,87) = 2.61, p = .110, partial h2 = 0.029). The text difficulty fluency group interaction analysis was nonsignificant (F(2,87) = 0.60, p = .130). When testing for main effects of fluency group, we ran a Fishers least significant difference (LSD) test and found that the low fluency group decreased F0 significantly less at the ends of sentences than both the middle and high groups (mean difference = 18.68, p = .010, and 36.37 Hz, respectively; p < .001). The middle and high groups also differed significantly from each other (mean difference = 17.68 Hz, p = .016). Thus,
it is evident that fluency had a strong effect on childrens sentence-final F0 (see Figure 1). The pause ratio omnibus test revealed somewhat different results. A very large and significant effect of fluency group was again found (F(2,87) = 50.91, p < .001, partial h2 = 0.539), with more fluent children having a lower ratio of pauses than less fluent children. A quite large and significant effect of text difficulty was also found, with children making more pauses in the more difficult text (F(1,87) = 202.37, p < .001, partial h2 = 0.699). However, the pause ratio omnibus test revealed a large and significant fluency group text difficulty interaction (F(2,87) = 24.95, p < .001, partial h2 = 0.365). To test for simple effects of text difficulty, we performed three dependent-samples t-tests: one for each fluency group. The t-tests comparing text difficulty differences within each group revealed significant differences for all fluency groups at p < .01. In all fluency groups, children paused significantly more when reading the more difficult text (low: t(29) = 11.68, p < .001; middle: t(30) = 8.63, p < .001; high: t(28) = 3.57, p = .001). However, as demonstrated in Figure 1, the mean difference in pausing between texts increased as a function of decreasing fluency. Thus, the pause ratio of children just reading at grade level (i.e., low fluency
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Figure 1. Changes in Prosody as a Function of Fluency Skill Level and Text Difficulty
Intrasential pause ratio
0.7
r between adult and child F0
Adultlike prosody
0.80 0.75 0.70 0.65 0.60 0.55 0.50 0.45 0.40
s s s
0.6 0.5
Pause ratio
0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

s s s
Low Middle High
Low Middle High
Easy
Text difficulty
Difficult
Easy
Difficult Text difficulty
Ungrammatical pause ratio

0.9 0.8
Decline in Hz
Sentence-final F0 declination
70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
s s s
0.7
Pause ratio
0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2
s s s
Low Middle High
Low Middle High
Easy
Text difficulty
Difficult
Easy
Difficult Text difficulty
Note. Adultlike prosody = adultlike prosody score based on intonation contour; difficult=difficult text from the GORT; easy=easy text from the GORT; sentence-final F0declination =average sentence-final F0 change.
in this context) increased sharply in the more difficult text, whereas the pause ratio of high fluency readers increased significantly but not as dramatically. A Fishers LSD test confirmed this. The difference between the easy and difficult text was significantly greater among the low-f luency readers than among the middlefluency readers (p < .001), and the difference between the easy and difficult texts was significantly greater among middle-fluency readers than high-fluency readers (p < .001). Thus, as text difficulty increases, the number of pauses children make multiplies as a function of decreased fluency. Conducting an ANOVA on the measures of ungrammatical pausing revealed a significant and large effect of fluency group (F(2,87) = 11.96, p < .001, partial h2 = 0.216). A Fishers LSD analysis revealed that the high-fluency group paused ungrammatically significantly less often than both the low- and medium-fluency groups (p < .001 for both comparisons), while the low- and middle-fluency groups did not differ significantly from one another (p = .412), although all groups decreased their ungrammatical pausing when reading the difficult text. There was also a medium-sized
effect of text difficulty (F(1,87) = 8.209, p = .005, partial h2 = 0.086). We found a nonsignificant text difficulty fluency group interaction (F(2,87) = 0.266, p = .767), indicating that all groups tended to decrease ungrammatical pausing as text difficulty increased. It appears that when the most fluent readers pause, their pauses tend to be grammatically appropriate, and more difficult text seems to promote this behavior among all groups more than the easy text. Finally, the adultlike prosody score omnibus test revealed a significant effect by fluency group (F(2,87) = 8.88, p < .001, partial h2 = 0.170) and a significant effect by text difficulty (F(1,87) = 17.47, p < .001, partial h2 = 0.167), with children becoming more adultlike in their prosody as text difficulty increased. However, there was not a significant text difficulty fluency group interaction (F(2,87) = 0.076, p = .927). To test for main effects of fluency group, we ran a Fishers LSD test and found that the middle- and high-fluency groups were significantly more adultlike in their prosody than the low-fluency group (p < .01 for both comparisons), but the middle- and high-fluency groups did not differ from one another (p = .209).
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In sum, we found that childrens fluency level influences their prosody when reading both easy and difficult texts. For the most part, childrens prosody was affected by text difficulty similarly regardless of their level of fluency. However, as texts became difficult, less fluent children made proportionally more pauses than more fluent children.
Prosodic Reading as a Predictor of Fluency and Comprehension

A second goal of the present study was to determine the predictive value of reading prosody: (a) whether prosody in a difficult text served as a better predictor of standardized assessments of reading fluency than prosody in an easy text, and (b) whether reading prosody can serve as a predictor of standardized assessments of comprehension beyond that accounted for by reading rate-type measures such as the TOWRE and GORT.
Reading Prosody as a Predictor of Fluency

To look at reading prosody as a predictor of fluency, each variable was individually entered into a regression analysis with fluency skill as the dependent variable. Again, fluency skill was based on childrens standardized test performance using their GORT and TOWRE scores. As is evident in Table 2, each prosody variable
correlated significantly with fluency skill. However, intonation contour and ungrammatical pausing from the easy text correlated with fluency skill much less than any of the other variables, suggesting that there is a more tenuous relationship between these two prosody variables and fluency skill in easy texts. To determine whether the four prosody variables from the difficult text were more or less predictive of fluency than the prosody variables from the easy text, we examined easy text and difficult text prosody individually as predictors of fluency. Easy text prosody significantly predicted fluency, but the predictive value of difficult text prosody was clearly greater (see Table 3). We then carried out a two-block hierarchical regression using the fluency skill score as the dependent variable. In the first block, we entered the prosody variables from the easy text. In the second, we entered the prosody variables from the difficult text. As difficult text prosody seemed to have a stronger relationship with fluency than easy text prosody, a significant R 2 change was expected, which was confirmed. Difficult text prosody accounted for a significant portion (11.6%) of the variance in fluency skill beyond that accounted for by easy text prosody alone. When we reversed this process by entering in the prosody variables from the difficult text first, the prosody from the easy texts no longer contributed significant variance in predicting fluency skill. The
Table 2. Correlations Between Prosody Variables, Fluency Skill, and Comprehension

Easy sentencefinal F0 0.431* -0.338* -0.478* 0.325* 0.160 -0.117 -0.330* -0.421* 0.105 0.324* -0.040 0.842* -0.466* -0.457* 0.265** -0.380* -0.516* 0.298* 0.355* -0.093 -0.100 Difficult sentencefinal F0 Easy pause ratio Difficult pause ratio Easy F0 contour Difficult F0 contour Easy ungrammatical pause ratio Difficult ungrammatical pause Fluency skill
Variables Difficult sentence-final F0 Easy pause ratio Difficult pause ratio Easy F0 contour Difficult F0 contour Easy ungrammatical pause ratio Difficult ungrammatical pause ratio Fluency skill WIAT-RC
-0.370*
-0.339*
0.477*
0.617*
-0.111
-0.222**
0.273*
0.479* 0.464*
0.475* 0.504*
-0.706* -0.592*
-0.817* -0.696*
0.265** 0.211**
0.421* 0.356*
-0.280* -0.277*
-0.522* -0.501* 0.741*
Note. Difficult=difficult text from the GORT; easy=easy text from the GORT; F0 contour=adultlike prosody score based on intonation contour; sentencefinal F0=average sentence-final F0 change; WIAT-RC = Wechsler Individual Achievement Tests Reading Comprehension subtest. * p<.01;. ** p<.05.
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Table 3. Easy Versus Difficult Text Prosody as Predictors of Fluency

Model 1 2 3 4 r 0.766a 0.835
b
r2 0.587 0.697 0.702 0.702
Adjusted r2 0.567 0.682 0.673 0.673
SE of estimate 7.781 6.449 6.76 6.76
Model F 30.16 46.58 23.91 23.91
df 1,2 4,85 4,85 8,81 8,81
p .001 .001 .001 .001
r2 change 0.116 0.014
F change 7.88 0.96
df 1,2 4,81 4,81
p value of F change .001 .433
0.838c 0.838
d
Note. df = degrees of freedom; Difficult=difficult text from the GORT; easy=easy text from the GORT; F0 contour=adultlike prosody score based on intonation contour; r = Pearson correlation; SE = standard error; sentence-final F0=average sentence-final F0 change. a Predictors: constant, easy F0 contour, easy ungrammatical pause, easy sentence-final F0, and easy pause ratio. bPredictors: constant, difficult F0 contour, difficult ungrammatical pause, difficult sentence-final F0, and difficult pause ratio. cPredictors for step 1: constant, easy F0 contour, easy ungrammatical pause, easy sentence-final F0, and easy pause ratio; predictors for step 2: difficult F0 contour, difficult ungrammatical pause, difficult sentence-final F0, and difficult pause ratio. dPredictors for step 1: constant, difficult F0 contour, difficult ungrammatical pause, difficult sentence-final F0, and difficult pause ratio; predictors for step 2: easy F0 contour, easy ungrammatical pause, easy sentence-final F0, and easy pause ratio.
coefficients for the model with difficult text prosody variables alone are presented in Table 4.
Reading Prosody as a Predictor of Comprehension

To determine whether reading prosody independently predicts reading comprehension, we carried out analysis of two models using two-block hierarchical regression (see Tables 5 and 6). For the first model, we entered fluency as a predictor of comprehension. Comprehension was measured by childrens standard scores on the WIAT-RC subtest. In the second model, we entered fluency as a predictor of comprehension in the first block and added easy text prosody variables in the second block. For the third model, we entered fluency as a predictor of comprehension in the first block and added difficult text prosody variables in the second block. As expected, fluency accounted for a significant amount of variance in the reading comprehension scores of the
WIAT. When the prosody variables from the easy text were added in a second step, they were found to have no significant predictive value beyond that of fluency. However, when prosody variables from the difficult text were added in this second step instead, we found that difficult text prosody accounted for 5.5% more variance in comprehension beyond fluency alone (see Table 5). The remaining question is, How much can reading prosody stand on its own as a predictor of reading comprehension? Indeed, some studies using reading expression ratings have done just that (e.g., Rasinski et al., 2009). To determine this, we carried out a third twostep multiple regression. We regressed reading comprehension on difficult text prosody in the first step and added reading fluency skill in the second step. As can be seen in Table 5, reading prosody by itself accounted for 54.3% of the variance in reading comprehension skill, but adding reading fluency to the equation accounted for an additional 6.2% of the variance in reading comprehension. Thus, reading fluency skill and
Table 4. Coefficients of Difficult Text Prosody as a Predictor of Reading Fluency

Unstandardized coefficients Difficult text prosody variables Constant Difficult sentence-final F0 Difficult F0 contour Difficult pause ratio Difficult ungrammatical pause Beta 123.467 0.046 -1.801 -35.368 -0.227 SE 4.815 0.019 5.571 4.198 3.588 0.161 -0.023 -0.758 -0.005 Standardized coefficients Beta t 26.640 2.371 -0.315 -8.425 -0.063 p .001 .020 .753 .001 .950
Note. Difficult=difficult text from the GORT; F0 contour=adultlike prosody score based on intonation contour; SE = standard error; sentence-final F0=average sentence-final F0 change; t = significance test for each variable in the equation controlling for all other variables.
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Table 5. Fluency and Reading Prosody as Predictors of Comprehension

Change statistics Model 1 2 3 4 5 r 0.741a 0.763b 0.777c 0.737d 0.777e r2 0.549 0.582 0.604 0.543 0.604 Adjusted r2 0.544 0.557 0.581 0.521 0.581 Standard error of the estimate 10.292 10.146 9.869 10.546 9.869 r2 change 0.549 0.033 0.055 0.543 0.062 F change 107.19 1.64 2.926 25.22 13.07 df 1 1 4 4 4 1 df 2 88 84 84 85 84 Significant F change 0.001 0.173 0.026 0.001 0.001
Note. df = degrees of freedom; difficult=difficult text from the GORT; easy=easy text from the GORT; F0 contour=adultlike prosody score based on intonation contour; r = Pearson correlation; sentence-final F0=average sentence-final F0 change. a Predictors: constant and fluency skill average. bPredictors for step 1: constant and fluency skill average; predictors for step 2: easy text prosody variables. c Predictors for step 1: constant and fluency skill average; predictors for step 2: difficult text prosody variables. dPredictors: constant and difficult text prosody variables. ePredictors for step 1: constant and difficult text prosody variables; predictor for step 2: fluency skill average.
Table 6. Final Model Coefficients for Prediction of Reading Comprehension From Fluency-Related Variable
Unstandardized coefficients Model Fluency average Difficult sentence-final F0 Difficult F0 contour Difficult pause ratio Difficult ungrammatical pause Beta 0.573 0.066 -2.025 -13.182 -4.537 SE 0.158 0.029 8.347 8.307 5.241 Standardized coefficients Beta 0.445 0.181 -0.020 -0.219 -0.077 t 3.620 2.270 -0.243 -1.590 -0.866 p .001 .026 .809 .116 .389
Note. Difficult=difficult text from the GORT; F0 contour=adultlike prosody score based on intonation contour; sentence-final F0=average sentence-final F0 change; t = significance test for each variable in the equation controlling for all other variables.
reading prosody taken together provide a better indictor of reading comprehension than either skill alone.
Summary of Results
The first goal of the study was to determine whether the prosody of children learning to read is affected by text difficulty and skill. Our findings demonstrate that text difficulty impacts prosodic performance. When reading a more difficult text aloud, children paused more often between words within the sentence. Although pausing increased when reading a more difficult text, these pauses tended to reflect the grammar of these more complex sentences more often. Childrens intonation contour was more adultlike with the more difficult text. These trends held among all fluency levels. Thus, rather than eroding childrens reading prosody, in some respects, children seemed to marshal prosodic resources to deal with the more difficult text.
We also examined whether childrens fluency, as determined by their standard scores on tests of fluency relying on reading rate, played a role in their reading prosody as a function of text difficulty. Overall, there was consistency in the behavior of children of varying levels of fluency in response to the more difficult text. Among all fluency groups, children became more adultlike in their prosody as text difficulty increased, and the character of their pauses were more linked to the grammar of the sentence. All groups exhibited proportionally more general intrasentential pausing in response to the more difficult text, but this increase in pausing was sharpest among children at the lowest fluency level, whereas children at the highest level only increased modestly. By definition, fluent readers read with greater speed than dysfluent readers, so they were probably able to incorporate more wordsan entire sentence, for instancewithin one breath. Difficult passages have longer sentences, so the increase in overall pausing across
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fluency groups is not surprising, particularly for the less fluent readers. The sharp increase in pausing for the less fluent readers might also be explained by an increased number of decoding uncertainties as text difficulty increased. An examination into the nature of these pauses revealed that while students may pause more when reading a relatively difficult text, a higher ratio of these pauses might be considered grammatically acceptable. Ungrammatical pausing actually decreased across fluency groups as text difficulty increased. As in prior research (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004), we found general differences in reading prosody among children of varying levels of fluency regardless of text difficulty. Children with higher standard scores for fluency made larger sentence-final declinations, had more adultlike prosody, and made proportionally fewer general and ungrammatical pauses than children with the lowest fluency levels in the study. Further, the high-fluency group demonstrated consistently greater skill than the middlefluency group among all prosody variables except adultlike prosody scores. Thus, the pattern depicted by our study is that less fluent readers demonstrated generally poorer prosody than more fluent readers. A second goal of our study was to determine the extent to which prosody measured from easy or difficult text was predictive of standardized assessments of fluency and reading comprehension skill. As expected, prosodic variables for both the easy and difficult texts correlated significantly with fluency scores. Reading prosody from difficult texts by itself accounted for nearly 70% of the variance in standard scores of reading fluency. However, prosody from the more difficult text was found to account for 11.6% more variance in fluency than prosody measured from the easy text alone. Thus, it can be concluded that measuring reading prosody from a difficult text will serve as a better indicator of a childs general fluency than measuring it from an easy text. It has long been held that fluency is a bridge between decoding and comprehension (Pikulski, 2005; Pikulski & Chard, 2005). Indeed, reading rate measures such as the ones we have included under fluency skill have been shown to be fundamentally and foundationally related to comprehension (NICHD, 2000). However, fluency skill is usually defined as reading that is quick, accurate, and expressive (NICHD, 2000). A second part to our question, then, is whether having good prosody is related to good comprehension in any way beyond rate measures alone. Our findings suggest that the answer is dependent on the difficulty of the text from which prosody is measured. Regression analyses demonstrated that prosody from the difficult text was more predictive of comprehension than prosody from the easy text. In fact, prosody from the
easy text did not account for any significant variance in comprehension skills beyond what could be explained by rate measures alone. Prosody from the difficult text, however, did account for a moderate percentage of variance in comprehension scores beyond what could be explained by rate measures alone.
The Role of Text Difficulty in Reading Prosody

By focusing on text difficulty, the current study adds to our knowledge of the role of reading prosody in fundamental reading skills. We found that text difficulty played a significant role in childrens prosodic reading; prosody, fluency, and reading comprehension were more strongly intercorrelated for the more difficult text. Reading prosody is thought to be related to sentence parsing, although it is not isomorphic to it (Wheeldon & Lahiri, 1997). Our findings resemble those of Young and Bowers (1995), who also studied text difficultys impact on childrens parsing judgments. They too found that childrens parsing judgments were best on their most difficult story and that parsing and ratings of reading fluency were more strongly correlated in the most difficult text. To better identify the key features of our passages that yielded complexity effects on prosody, since prosody can be impacted by discourse, syntactic, and lexical features, we conducted a linguistic analysis, focusing on the sentences that were prosodically analyzed, using Coh-Metrix, a psycholinguistic computational tool for analyzing texts (Graesser, McNamara, Louwerse, & Cai, 2004) and CPIDR (Brown, Snodgrass, Kemper, Herman, & Covington, 2008). Recall that the passages were originally selected because they had been verified to have good psychometric readability characteristics in terms of their actual difficulty for a large normative sample of children. The difficult passage was more complex than the easy passage in terms of number of words per sentence (11 versus 8.3), number of words before the main verb (4 versus 2), and syntactic similarity across sentences (0.166 versus 0.368). The two passages were similar in terms of lexical features (concreteness: 225 versus 251 on a scale of 1 to 400; number of syllables/word: 1.2 versus 1.1) and discourse features (propositional density: 0.46 versus 0.48; number of idea units: 15 versus 12; and causal cohesion: 0 versus 0). Thus, in our case, the complexity of the difficult passage seemed to stem primarily from syntactic elements. Previous studies have shown a relationship between reading prosody and the achievement of fluent reading, but the potential role of text difficulty in reading prosody has largely been ignored. Like the current study, previous ones (Clay & Imlach, 1971; Dowhower, 1987;
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Klauda & Guthrie, 2008; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Rasinski et al., 2009; Ravid & Mashraki, 2007; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004) have found that more expressive readers tend to have faster reading rates and comprehend more of what they read. This has been true for studies using expressiveness ratings (e.g., Klauda & Guthrie, 2008; Rasinski et al., 2009) or other prosody measures (Cowie et al., 2002; Whalley & Hansen, 2006). The current study suggests that, if anything, reading prosody amplifies in the reading of difficult text rather than erodes. This amplification of reading prosody occurred even for children whose reading skills were just approaching grade level and for whom our difficult text might be considered too difficult. Intuition tells us that reading prosody should fall apart as children read such difficult texts with long sentences and low-frequency words. The question is why it did not in general. To find an explanation for the amplification of reading prosody in difficult texts, we must look at theoretical import of linguistic prosody for general language processing. One of the proposed psycholinguistic functions of prosody is to provide a scaffold that allows one to hold an auditory sequence in working memory (Boucher, 2006; Frazier et al., 2006; Swets et al., 2007). Long, complex sentences with difficult vocabulary require such prosodic scaffolding. By cognitively bracketing key informational units such as phrases, prosody is said to assist by maintaining an utterance in working memory until a more complete semantic analysis can be carried out (Koriat et al., 2002). The current study supports the position that the achievement of quick and accurate reading is related to the development of good reading prosody. Once children have quick and accurate reading, they have cognitive resources available that can be put to use to enhance comprehension. Prosody is thought to enhance comprehension, and indeed, it seems to be used in oral reading; in this study, good reading prosody was linked to good comprehension skills. Children with good comprehension skills had more exaggerated prosody in general. We would argue that these cognitive resources that are freed up from having quick and accurate reading seem to be actively recruited to amplify reading prosody particularly for the purpose of enhancing the comprehension of complex text. We believe that complex text is more likely to encourage the use of good reading prosody, because children need it for comprehension. As texts become more difficult and press the limits of childrens abilities, more or different prosodic variables are recruited to support comprehension as a means of amplifying the segmenting and communicative effects of prosody for short-term memory. However, basic reading skills do have the potential to affect some aspects of childrens reading prosody as
they proceed to more complex texts. We found that lower skilled children, in particular, carried out more pausing in general as they read the more complex text. Indeed, the slowed reading of less skilled children will cause them physiologically to run out of air midsentencenecessitating a pauseand they may pause to recognize unfamiliar words. Cowie et al. (2002) also found that inexpressive readers made more inappropriate pauses as they progressed through texts. Miller and Schwanenflugel (2008) found pausing to be linked to decoding in dysfluent readers as well. Regardless, we found that our less skilled readers, despite making more intrasentential pauses, tended to try to synchronize those pauses with grammatically relevant places in the text in their reading of complex texts. This suggests that even less skilled readers were attempting to use their prosody to support the processing of the difficult text.
Implications of the Study

The hypothesis for the current study is that text difficulty plays a role in reading prosody and the predictive value of prosody. It was shown that prosody measurements from the more difficult text were more predictive of standardized assessments of fluency than from the easy text. The study supports the definition of reading fluency as reading that is quick, accurate, and expressive. The study has implications for reading assessment. A number of reliable, valid, and easy-to-use holistic rubrics have been developed and designed to capture reading expressiveness. Assuming that such rubrics measure something similar to what we have done more technically here, the results from the present study have implications for the appropriate use of such holistic oral reading rubrics (Pinnell et al., 1995; Rasinski, 2006; Rasinski et al., 2009). Specifically, we believe that these rubrics will ultimately need to include some indicator of text difficulty. Further, when such rubrics are used to measure childrens fluency with a single text, the current study suggests that using texts that are slightly challenging for individual students is likely a better indicator than using easy texts. Also, to the extent that reading prosody can be used for predicting comprehension, assessments should be difficult enough to require the students use of prosody as a possible scaffold to comprehension. The study also suggests that that these rubrics should be supplemented with measures of reading rate and accuracy, since models that include rate and accuracy measures as well as prosody measures accounted for more variance than either reading prosody or rate and accuracy measures alone. Finally, it is also clear that fluency, including rate, accuracy, and prosody measures, is a contributor to, but not the same as, comprehension. Indeed, all of our fluency measures that included
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prosody only accounted for approximately 60% of the variance in reading comprehension skills. The current study may have implications for the classroom as well. The National Assessment of Educational Progress study (Pinnell et al., 1995) found that oral reading experience can be important in developing reading fluency; however, not all oral reading activities may be equally successful with all students (p. 59). The current study suggests that one text may not match the scaffolding needs of all students in a classroom. Indeed, children may benefit from oral reading practice with texts that are difficult relative to their current level of fluency. Some classroom studies have shown that classroom practices that endorse the extended oral reading of texts that press the limits of difficulty for childrens current level of fluency may improve childrens fluency and comprehension (Kuhn et al., 2006; OConnor, Swanson, & Geraghty, 2010; Schwanenflugel et al., 2009; Stahl, Heubach, & Holcomb, 2005). Although those studies did not measure prosody, by inferring from our current study, it is likely that the use of such texts had the effect of increasing the amount of prosodic reading that children engaged in. We speculate that the practice of engaging in prosodic reading daily was at least partly responsible for the long-term instructional benefits in fluency and comprehension. We recognize, however, that this would need to be substantiated by further research.
Limitations of the Study and Directions for Future Research

The present study was conducted for the simple purpose of examining the effect of text difficulty on oral reading prosody, fluency, and comprehension. However, conclusions about prosody, especially, are limited, since it was examined only at the sentence level. Recent research has found significant effects of prosody at the word (Ashby, 2006; Ashby & Clifton, 2005; Weber, 2006; Whalley & Hansen, 2006), syntactic unit (Hirose, 2003; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006; Smith, 2004; Whalley & Hansen, 2006), and discourse or passage levels (Klauda & Guthrie, 2008; Smith, 2004). Conclusions made by examining prosodic behavior at the sentence level (i.e., sentence-final F0 change, number of intrasentential pauses, intonation contour) might not necessarily reflect a readers full prosodic knowledge. Indeed, the moderate connection found in the present study between prosody and comprehension might have been even stronger had phrasal and passage-level prosody been examined. If reading with expression involves segmenting text into meaningful units (Dowhower, 1991) and demonstrating an awareness of story or passage grammar (Klauda & Guthrie, 2008), then work needs to continue examining prosody
and chunking at the syntactic unit and passage levels as opposed to simply the word or sentence level. Further, using longer passages with greater topic development would have allowed us to determine whether there are discourse prosody features connected to comprehension, and longer passages would potentially engage more prosodic features (Wennerstrom, 2001). We had hoped to narrow the types of prosody features that would be needed to be measured for discerning good reading fluency and good comprehension. Some studies have suggested that pitch contours are particularly related to comprehension (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006, 2008; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004). Pause measures are sometimes related to comprehension (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2008) and sometimes not (Schwanenflugel et al., 2004; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006). Ravid and Mashraki (2007) found that children were better at using appropriate pausing than intonation, supporting the belief that prosodic reading reflects online processing that is more sensitive to structure than content (Koriat et al., 2002). In the current study, pause measures were particularly important in differentiating fluent from less fluent children when reading complex texts. It is unclear whether these differences are attributable to features of the texts themselves and the prosody needed to convey their meanings. Regardless, elements of prosody always seem to be related to fluency and comprehension in one way or another, so it seems safer to suggest that prosody is important to measure when measuring reading fluency (Rasinski et al., 2009). Several useful results from the present study and past research may be used to inform future research. First, with the apparent effect of text difficulty on prosody found in the present study, future studies should use spectrographic prosody measures to examine the effects of fluency on larger discourse-level processing at different levels of text complexity. Second, the role of text genre should also be explored in regard to the impact that prosody has on comprehension, with comprehension of some genres (e.g., narrative) relating to prosody more than others (e.g., technical, instructional). Third, it may be important to take into account childrens current developmental understanding of the functions of speech prosody in considering their development of reading prosody (Kuhn et al., 2010). In sum, although fluency can be divided into three major components (i.e., rate, accuracy, and expression [prosody]), rate and accuracy have been, up to this point, the most consistently measured elements of the construct. Prosody is intuitively important for conveying meaning in oral reading, but without objective assessment techniques, it has been difficult to measure. In this study, we supported the hypothesis that complex texts enhance the connection between prosody and
402
fluency, and prosody and comprehension. Further research is needed to explore effective and practical methods of integrating prosody with formal and classroom reading assessment.
Note
This research was supported in part by the Interagency Education Research Initiative, a program of research jointly managed by the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant 0089258), the Institute of Education Sciences of the U.S. Department of Education, and the NICHD of the National Institutes of Health (NIH Grant 7 R01 HD040746-06).
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fluency instruction: Short- and long-term effects of two reading programs. Literacy Research and Instruction, 48(4), 318336. doi:10.1080/19388070802422415 Schwanenflugel, P.J., Meisinger, E.B., Wisenbaker, J.M., Kuhn, M.R., Strauss, G.P., & Morris, R.D. (2006). Becoming a fluent and automatic reader in the early elementary school years. Reading Research Quarterly, 41(4), 496522. doi:10.1598/RRQ.41.4.4 Smith, C.L. (2004). Topic transitions and durational prosody in reading aloud: Production and modeling. Speech Communication, 42(3/4), 247270. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2003.09.004 Snow, D.P., Coots, J.H., & Smith, K. (1982). Speech prosody and childrens perception of sentence organization (Report No. SWRLTN-2-82/34). Los Alamitos, CA: Southwest Regional Laboratory for Educational Research and Development. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED222890) Spache, G. (1953). A new readability formula for primary-grade reading materials. The Elementary School Journal, 53(7), 410413. doi:10.1086/458513 Stahl, S.A., Heubach, K.M., & Holcomb, A. (2005). Fluencyoriented reading instruction. Journal of Literacy Research, 37(1), 2560. doi:10.1207/s15548430jlr3701_2 Swets, B., Desmet, T., Hambrick, D.Z., & Ferreira, F. (2007). The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: A psychometric approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136(1), 6481. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.136.1.64 Weber, R. (2006). Function words in the prosody of f luent reading. Journal of Research in Reading, 29(3), 258269. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9817.2006.00307.x Wennerstrom, A. (2001). Intonation and evaluation in oral narratives. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(8), 11831206. doi:10.1016/ S0378-2166(00)00061-8 Whalley, K., & Hansen, J. (2006). The role of prosodic sensitivity in childrens reading development. Journal of Research in Reading, 29(3), 288303. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9817.2006.00309.x Wheeldon, L., & Lahiri, A. (1997). Prosodic units in speech production. Journal of Memory and Language, 37(3), 356 381. doi:10.1006/jmla.1997.2517 Wichmann, A. (1994). F0 troughs and prosodic phrasing: An investigation into the linguistic information contained in a speakers base line when reading. Hermes, 13, 205212. Wiederholt, J.L., & Bryant, B.R. (2001). GORT-4: Gray Oral Reading Tests (4th ed.) [Kit]. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed. Yldz, M., Yldrm, K., Ates, S., & etinkaya, C. (2009). An evaluation of the oral reading fluency of 4th graders with respect to prosodic characteristics. International Journal of Human Sciences, 6(1), 353360. Young, A., & Bowers, P.G. (1995). Individual difference and text difficulty determinants of reading f luency and expressiveness. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 60(3), 428454. doi:10.1006/jecp.1995.1048 Submitted September 6, 2009 Final revision received March 26, 2010 Accepted April 22, 2010
Rebekah George Benjamin is a doctoral student, University of Georgia, Athens, USA; e-mail bben81@gmail.com. Paula J. Schwanenflugel is a professor of educational psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics, University of Georgia, Athens, USA; e-mail pschwan@uga.edu.
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Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers

Rebekah George Benjamin, Paula J. Schwanenflugel

Measuring the Development of Reading Prosody

Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers

The Relationship Between Prosody and Comprehension

The Impact of Text Difficulty

Reading Research Quarterly 45(4)

The Purpose of the Study

Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers

Reading Comprehension Assessment

General Assessments and Procedures

Word Reading Efficiency Assessment

Reading Prosody Assessment and Procedures

Oral Reading Fluency Assessment

Reading Research Quarterly 45(4)

Measurement of Prosodic Features

Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers

The Impact of Text Difficulty on Reading Prosody

Reading Research Quarterly 45(4)

Table 1. Descriptive Statistics of Childrens Fluency, Comprehension, and Prosody Measurements

Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers

0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

Low Middle High

Low Middle High

Difficult Text difficulty

Ungrammatical pause ratio

0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2

Low Middle High

Low Middle High

Difficult Text difficulty

Reading Research Quarterly 45(4)

Prosodic Reading as a Predictor of Fluency and Comprehension

Reading Prosody as a Predictor of Fluency

Table 2. Correlations Between Prosody Variables, Fluency Skill, and Comprehension

-0.522* -0.501* 0.741*

Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers

Table 3. Easy Versus Difficult Text Prosody as Predictors of Fluency

r2 0.587 0.697 0.702 0.702

Adjusted r2 0.567 0.682 0.673 0.673

SE of estimate 7.781 6.449 6.76 6.76

Model F 30.16 46.58 23.91 23.91

df 1,2 4,85 4,85 8,81 8,81

p .001 .001 .001 .001

r2 change 0.116 0.014

F change 7.88 0.96

df 1,2 4,81 4,81

p value of F change .001 .433

Reading Prosody as a Predictor of Comprehension

Table 4. Coefficients of Difficult Text Prosody as a Predictor of Reading Fluency

Reading Research Quarterly 45(4)

Table 5. Fluency and Reading Prosody as Predictors of Comprehension

Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers

The Role of Text Difficulty in Reading Prosody

Reading Research Quarterly 45(4)

Implications of the Study

Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers

Limitations of the Study and Directions for Future Research

Reading Research Quarterly 45(4)

Text Complexity and Oral Reading Prosody in Young Readers

Reading Research Quarterly 45(4)

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