Text difficulty and oral reading prosody in Taiwanese children

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.