The Role of prosodic skills in reading comprehension

The thesis investigated prosody, often described as the rhythm and melody of spoken language, and largely absent in text, and established its importance in reading comprehension in children and adults. A series of studies showed that prosodic skills played a unique, hitherto largely unrecognised, role in reading comprehension in grade 3 and 4 children, beyond prosody’s indirect role in supporting word identification and listening comprehension. Using electroencephalography (EEG) the real-time processing of spoken complex sentences with and without prosody were investigated in adults. Prosodic speech was processed differently (right hemisphere-based), suggesting an interaction with syntactic processes to support superior comprehension