Oral reading prosody and the relation with reading abilities: A comparison of two rating scales

Several cross-linguistic studies found that oral reading prosody (i.e., prosodic variations in reading aloud) correlates with reading comprehension. As an extension, the present study aimed to examine the relationship between oral reading prosody and beyond word-level reading abilities in tone languages like Mandarin. One hundred and nine third-grade children were recruited in Taipei, Taiwan and undertook the following tasks: nonverbal IQ, vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, word reading, reading fluency (rate and accuracy), reading comprehension, and oral reading prosody. In the oral reading prosody task, children read aloud narrative prose at the Grade 3 level and their production was evaluated through two rating scales: Rasinski's (Edu Leadshp 61: 46, 2004) and Benjamin et al.'s (Read Res Q 28: 105-133, 2013) scales. Several key findings were found as follows. First, ANOVAs compared children's performance on oral reading prosody across word reading quartiles and found that oral reading prosody differed as a function of word reading. Second, hierarchical regressions controlled age, nonverbal IQ, vocabulary and syntactic knowledge, word reading and found that oral reading prosody rated through Rasinski's (Edu Leadshp 61: 46, 2004) and Benjamin et al.'s (Read Res Q 28: 105-133, 2013) scales made significant contributions to reading fluency and reading comprehension in Grades 3 and 4. Taken together, oral reading prosody, implicated in word reading, is important to beyond word-level reading abilities.