Costa, A. , Falé, I. , Hub Faria, I. & Condelipes, T.
Laboratório de Psicolinguística, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa
We aim to present evaluation materials still under construction, in order to design an oral reading fluency test not yet available in European Portuguese.
Assuming that reading fluency is strongly influenced by the linguistic properties of reading materials, we are developing a reading fluency test strongly focused on linguistic and discursive aspects. Our goal is to contribute to create tools which account for the establishment between fluency and text comprehension, and for the description of levels of reading development.
Three test passages with increasing informational and linguistic complexity are being designed. These texts are controlled for length (number of words and sentences), theme accessibility and familiarity, information structure (theme, topic continuity and topic shift), syntactic structure (sentence constituency; complex syntactic structures), lexical properties (morphological and syllabic structure, word frequency, word length), vocabulary specificity and layout (title, paragraphs, and typographic aspects).
Data from reading aloud will be analysed in terms of speech rate (number of syllables per minute), accuracy (average of correct read words) and prosodic organization. For the study of this latter dependent variable we will focus on the prosodic phrasing of the utterances (Selkirk, 1986; Nespor & Vogel, 1986). We assume that the EP prosodic phrasing tends to map the syntactic structure, although it is not isomorphic (Cutler, Dahan, & Donselaar, 1997; Falé, 1995; Frota, 2000; Viana, 1987). We built a prosodic matrix from what we consider to be expected as the pattern of each text oral reading. Exemplifying, where we are supposed to have three intonational phrases, as follows:
[ Campo de Ourique é um bairro de Lisboa]I [com hábitos extraordinários]I [que parecem ter parado no tempo]I
The prosodic matrix will be compared against subjects’ performances.
We believe that results from analysis of the three factors considered will definitely contribute for the creation of a reading fluency index.