Text Reading Prosody in Children with and without Primary Language Impairment

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare the text reading prosody, specifically pausing, of children with and without primary language impairment. The research questions aimed to determine if children with primary language impairment produced (a) more pauses during text reading than children without primary language impairment and (b) pauses of longer duration during text reading than children without primary language impairment. Thirteen children, ten without primary language impairment and three with primary language impairment, were selected from a larger study examining reading errors of school-age children. The children read a third-grade level passage as the text sample for this study. The reading was audio recorded and analyzed using the Praat software (Boersma & Weenink, Praat, Version 6.0.37) to analyze the number and duration of pauses. The results indicated that there was a statistically significant difference in the number of pauses between children with and without primary language impairment but not in the duration of these pauses. The implications of this study are that children with poor text reading prosody experience difficulties in reading comprehension, a lifelong skill needed for educational success. Text reading prosody provides cues that signal the emotional state of the reader, word and sentence level barriers, and grammatical structure. Without intervention, children with primary language impairment will continue to fall behind in their overall language and literacy skills. It is important to consider these implications in the future when determining the most appropriate methods of interventions targeting text reading prosody in the language impaired population.