Prosodic Reading. A study of third-grade pupils with reading difficulties.

The aim of the study is to expand the understanding what prosody looks like for primary school children with reading difficulties. In doing so, the study investigates the relationships in prosody between children with high skilled reading and low skilled reading. The study uses spectograms to measure the prosodic characteristics in 7- to 9-year old children. Reading comprehension and word decoding were assessed. The investigation reveales that children with reading difficulties produce more intrasentential pauses, and their reading is characterized by flat intonation patterns. The prosodic patterns suggests that the pupils do not percieve the grammatical information encoded in the test sentences. The study provides evidence that reading prosody seems to be related to reading comprehension. This finding is also supported in previous research