THE ROLE OF PROSODIC MARKERS IN READING FLUENCY

Abstract

ABSTRACT
Writing has graphics capabilities as graphics prosodic markers and lexical prosodic markers that guide the reader to proceed with the melodic variations and intonation of the passage that are under the scope of these graphic marks. Among the aspects that involve the reading performance, the prosody excels in the fundamental function of making the text understandable. As the purpose of the written text is your reading silently or aloud, the fluent reader must necessarily recover, in his reading, these prosodic aspects. Therefore, prosody is seen as a feature that should be considered for the reading fluency of the finding. So our goal in this work was to characterize the reading aloud of readers at different levels of education in order to understand the relationship between reading fluency and prosodic issues, as well as reading comprehension. Our hypothesis is that the ability to recover prosodic aspects incited in text by prosodic markers, as well as the speed, accuracy and reading comprehension are directly proportional to levels of education. To this end, we evaluated the reading aloud into three groups of readers: readers of the 2nd year of primary education; readers of the 2nd year of high school; readers university graduates. We consider the number of words read per minute to calculate the speed of reading, and the number of words read correctly to calculate the accuracy. The performance of reading comprehension was evaluated by testing understanding of multiple choice and cloze test. To check the behavior of participants with the melodic variations and raised intonation in the text written by the prosodic markers, we prepare an experimental design, in which we control target phrases under the impact of markers: lexical prosodics markers, to ask and to say; graficsprosodics markers: question mark (?), ellipsis, exclamation point, period and (unpointed). We also control the context in which these sentences appeared. We prepare two experimental conditions: one for the lexical prosodic marker to ask one for the lexical prosodic marker to say. We Control five combinations of phrases for each experimental condition: every lexical prosodic marker introduced phrases that were being finalized, sometimes by the question mark. Sometimes, by ellipsis.Sometimes, by exclamation point.Sometimes by period. Sometimes, the sentences were not finalized by graphic markers. Data were subjected to acoustic analysis and statistical tests to compare means. In the Acoustic analysis we observe the fundamental frequency. The results show that the more educated subjects had levels of comprehension, speed and accuracy of reading higher compared to less educated subjects. It follows, therefore, that the higher the level of schooling, the greater the velocity index, precision and, consequently, greater comprehension reader.