ERIC Number: EJ1489501
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025
Pages: 22
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0922-4777
EISSN: EISSN-1573-0905
Available Date: 2024-10-24
Text Difficulty and Oral Reading Prosody in Taiwanese Children
Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, v38 n8 p2363-2384 2025
Cross-linguistic studies found that reading comprehension correlates with oral reading prosody. The study examined whether text difficulty would be involved in oral reading prosody in orthographically deep languages like Mandarin. One hundred and three fourth-grade children were recruited in Taipei, Taiwan. Their oral reading prosody was elicited by four passages varying in text difficulty and then measured through acoustic analyses and scale ratings. Results revealed that (i) three dimensions of oral reading prosody (i.e., pitch, pause duration, and pause intrusion) were extracted from acoustic variables, regardless of text difficulty, and (ii) easy passages' oral reading prosody predicted reading comprehension more than a difficult passage's. The findings suggest that reading comprehension is predicted by oral reading prosody, which could be measured across acoustic analyses (i.e., pause and pitch) and scale ratings (i.e., natural pausing and appropriate intonation). Word reading in a challenging passage constrains children's semantic and syntactic processing in oral reading prosody for reading comprehension in orthographically deep languages.
Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Reading Comprehension, Oral Reading, Suprasegmentals, Mandarin Chinese, Grade 4, Elementary School Students, Difficulty Level, Acoustics, Intonation, Semantics, Syntax
Springer. Available from: Springer Nature. One New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-460-1700; e-mail: customerservice@springernature.com; Web site: https://link-springer-com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Elementary Education; Grade 4; Intermediate Grades
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Taiwan
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1National Taipei University of Education, Department of Special Education, Taipei, Taiwan

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