Reading fluency skill and the prosodic marking of linguistic focus

The purposes of the study were to determine whether third grade children mark linguistic focus features in their reading prosody and whether strong marking of these linguistic focus features might comprise an aspect of expressive reading typical of skilled, fluent reading. Children read a passage targeting information focusing aspects of prosody (direct quote, contrastive words, and exclamations). They also read a grade-level passage from the Qualitative Reading Inventory (Leslie & Caldwell, 2011) and completed the sight word subtest of Test of Word Reading Efficiency-2 (Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 2012). Children marked direct quote, contrastive words, and exclamations with a higher pitch than when in an unmarked context. They marked contrastive words and exclamations with greater intensity compared to an unmarked context. Further, reading fluency skill as determined by quick and accurate reading was connected to oral reading prosody that was generally more expressive for both sentence and linguistic focus prosodic features.