Dowhower’s indicators of reading with good prosody

1. Presence or lack of pausal intrusions with valid duration: Inappropriate pauses may include those within a word, between determiner and noun or within prepositional phrases. Inappropriate pauses have seriously detrimental affects on comprehension and could be an indicator of overemphasis on phonetic pronunciation.

2. Length of phrases between pauses: Organizing words into longer phrases has been known to improve prosody as well as reading comprehension. The best readers have an average of over seven words in a phrase while lower readers average less than two words between pauses.

3. Appropriateness and number of phrases: Phrases should be syntactically and phonologically appropriate as in: not crossing over punctuation, not reading word by word and avoiding arbitrary chunking of disconnected words. Difficulty with appropriate phrasing can be improved with explicit instruction and practice.

4. Lengthening of final words in syntactic phrases: The difference in vowel lengths at the end of a phrase and at the end of a sentence is indicative of proper prosodic reading. For example, note the change in ‘school’ in the following sentences: After school care is critical for a younger child. After school, care is critical for a younger child.

5. Terminal intonation contours: Pitch changes at punctuation, along with segmental lengthening and pausing, is marked by variations in vocal vibration. This results in rhythmic fluctuations of speech patterns, which indicate grammatical cues such as rising at the end of a question and falling at the end of a statement.

6. Stress or accent on words and phrases: Stress patterns are a complex aspect of prosody as it involves emphasis as well as elongation, loudness and intonation of syllables, words or phrases. Stressing one in every five words is prosaically appropriate while stressing once or twice for each word is more like listing or word calling.

Dowhower, S. L. Speaking of prosody: Fluency’s unattended bedfellow. Theory into Practice. Oxford: Summer, 1991. Vol XXX, Iss. 3, 165-175.

Inflection and Prosody as a function of Fluency

By DellaMcGuire and CameronVenuti