Speech Prosody and Children's Perception of Sentence Organization.

One hundred twenty-three fifth grade students participated in a study that investigated the role of prosodic cues in children's comprehension of discourse. The subjects, both good and poor readers, read, listened to, or read and listened to a story in one of four modes of visual and auditory presentation: (1) no audio, (2) normally intoned, (3) highly intoned, and (4) no print. In the first, second, and third conditions, the subjects completed both a comprehension message measure and a parsing activity in which they indicated points in the story where pauses were acceptable. Children in the fourth condition participated only in the comprehension activity. Results showed that the subjects were able to understand the parsing task and could identify intrasentence units in written passages. This was true even for those who did not have any auditory support during the task. The results of the parsing task showed that both good and poor readers readily perceived suprasegmental features in speech and used these cues effectively in identifying sentence structure. The findings support the theory that the poor representation of prosodic features in written text adds to the difficulty some children experience in learning to read. (Copies of the stimulus materials are appended.) (FL)