The role of prosody in Chinese-English reading comprehension

Abstract

<h3>Background</h3><p>Despite being an essential component of children's oral <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/reading-fluency" title="Learn more about reading fluency from ScienceDirect's AI-generated Topic Pages">reading fluency</a>, prosodic reading, which involves expressive changes in pitch patterns and pause durations, has not been explored in Cantonese-English bilingual children, whose first language (L1) is tonal, non-alphabetic, and whose second language (L2) is non-tonal, alphabetic.</p><h3>Aims</h3><p>This study examined the development of prosodic reading and its within- and cross-language associations with reading comprehension among Cantonese-English bilingual children from second to third grade.</p><h3>Sample</h3><p>One hundred and twenty-one 7-to 8-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual children completed initial testing in grade 2, with 52 tested in grade 3.</p><h3>Methods</h3><p>Prosodic reading was assessed using one Chinese and one English passage, each comprising six types of syntactic structures: declaratives, clause-final commas, <em>yes-no</em> questions, <em>wh-</em>questions, complex adjectival phrases, and quotatives. Word-reading efficiency, oral passage-reading fluency, and reading comprehension in Chinese and English were also measured.</p><h3>Results</h3><p>Spectrographic analyses revealed that these children were aware of language-independent functions and language-specific manifestations of pitch and pause cues within and across their L1 Chinese and L2 English. <em>Wh</em> question pitch contours emerged as the most robust link to reading comprehension across both languages, while a crossover effect occurred from Cantonese pitch to English reading comprehension. Shorter pauses for English declarative quotative sentences and phrase-final commas were concurrently associated with greater English reading comprehension.</p><h3>Conclusions</h3><p>These findings are interpreted within a new reading framework, the Prosodic Catalysing Hypothesis (PCH), which proposes that pitch and pause production can bridge prosody and syntax to facilitate reading comprehension.</p>