Relations between prosody and reading comprehension in Spanish-speaking students: systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Fluency has been considered one of the relevant factors involved in reading comprehension, by providing a bridge between decoding and comprehension. At present, fluency includes, alongside rate and accuracy, prosody as one the parts which plays a preponderant role in the construction of meaning during the reading process. Prosodic reading is the use of oral language features when reading a text, such as pausing, stress and intonation, in order that the text will be read aloud with the tonal and rhythmic characteristics of speech. Furthermore, prosodic reading makes it possible to organize word sequences into syntactically cohesive units of meaning. The aim of this study was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis, firstly, in order to determine the situation of research articles which enquire into the relation between prosody and reading comprehension, and secondly, to measure the significance of that relation in students who are native speakers of Spanish. To that end, a bibliographic search was performed without time restrictions in the following databases: Dialnet, Redalyc, SciELO, ERIC, Scopus and PubMed. The systematic review included 18 studies. The qualitative synthesis showed four categories of articles: (1) validation studies of instruments to assess reading fluency; (2) intervention studies on different prosodic aspects and enquiries into their impact on reading comprehension; (3) comparisons of good and poor comprehenders; and (4) correlational studies. A multilevel meta-analysis was performed in the correlational studies (n = 12), examining 59 correlation coefficients. The analysis showed a significant association between reading comprehension and prosody (t(58) = 9.77, p