The role of prosodic reading in reading comprehension among Cantonese-English bilingual children

Abstract

The study targeted to examining the role of prosodic reading in reading comprehension both within the same language and across two languages among Cantonese-English bilingual children. Spectrographic analysis of prosodic features, namely pitch pattern and pause structure, on targeted syntactically complex structures were carried out. We examined the relationship between prosodic features (pitch pattern and pause structure), word reading skills (text reading fluency and word reading efficiency) and reading comprehension. Our within-language analyzes showed that both pitch patterns and pause structures in Cantonese prosodic reading predicted Chinese reading comprehension whereas only pause structure in English prosodic reading predicted English reading comprehension. The cross-analyzes showed that only English prosodic reading predicted Chinese reading comprehension but not the vice versa. Moreover, pitch pattern, compared to pause structure, was more readily transferable in bilingual reading context. These findings provide new insights into the application of automaticity theory in bilingual context and demonstrate a significant link between reading prosody and reading comprehension in young Cantonese-English bilingual readers.