Quantifying Reading Comprehension with Prosody

Prosody in oral reading has been found to correlate with reading comprehension skill, especially in young developing readers. In order to examine this correlation in adults ‟ reading, this study examines the differences in the prosody of four adult readers (two readers with good comprehension and two readers with poor comprehension), with the goal of quantifying this reading skill through prosody. The subjects were all previously recorded reading three stories each which were then labeled using the ToBI framework. Prosodic boundaries, pitch accents, sentence-final intonation contour, and disfluencies were all analyzed for each reader. Results show quantitative differences between readers with different skills even when individual variation exists between readers of the same group, suggesting that reading skill might be able to be diagnosed through the study of an individual‟s prosody