Three studies were conducted to examine whether printed cues conveying information about spoken intonation patterns would aid beginning readers in synthesizing printed words into spoken sentences. To represent intonation patterns, words were printed in three sizes corresponding to stress-pitch levels, and spacing between phrase boundaries was extended to reflect pause points. Reading intoned text was contrasted with reading standard print and with print where word sizes and spaces were varied randomly. Story reading, cloze, sentence recall, and rereading tasks yielded multiple measures of reading behavior in samples of second graders, third graders, and below-grade-level fourth graders. Results indicated that children trained to read intoned print did not outperform the standard print or random print groups, suggesting that printed intonation cues are useless to beginning readers. (Author/AA)