Understanding prosody's role in reading acquisition

Many children learning to read go through a phase known as calling during which their oral reading is halting, expressionless, and word-by-word despite a fairly high level of accuracy in word identification. Some children experience considerable difficulty in learning to acquire oral reading fluency, which can be characterized as smooth, expressive production with appropriate phrasing or chunking in accordance with the syntactic structure of the material being read. Research on reading dysfluency has sought to identify the causes of the problem and to suggest successful methods of remediation. Schreiber (1980, 1987) and Read and Schreiber (1982) suggest that the dysfluency problem can at least in part be traced to the word caller's failure to recognize the syntactic structure of sentences in the written medium. The success of one general class of remediation techniques, the method of repeated readings, can in part be seen to follow from the opportunity it affords readers to perceive the syntactic organization of sentences. This article will sketch the basis for these claims.