RESEARCH SUMMARY
The authors stated that their “ongoing studies are evaluating whether marking stress explicitly in written English might aid struggling readers and late speakers of English. (Gross, Winegard, & Plotkowski, p. 1).” The introductory literature review section of the article provides a comprehensive overview of fluency. Research studies which were included described several types of fluency components, including the following: (Note: examples were given in the article.). • Alphabetic literacy (mastering letter-sound correspondence) • Understanding the prosody of English (vocal qualities such as stress, rhythm, timing, emphasis, intonation, and appropriate pausing and phrasing) • Placing appropriate stress for the noun and verb forms of words such as REcall and reCALL • Stress shifting when affixes are added such as ARtist vs. arTIStic Experiment One The first experiment investigated whether readers represent rhythm as they read silently. The reading material was formal poems, a type of text based on rhythms with a carefully arranged pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Participants were fifty-eight students in introductory psychology courses at a public university in the Great Lakes region of the United States. Fifty-seven were native English speakers, and one was a native Spanish speaker. Seven were also fluent in a second language. The poems followed three types of meters. In a trochaic meter, a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed meter (“PEter, PEter, PUMPkin EATer”). An iambic meter is based on an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (“The MAN is SMALL”). An anapestic meter has two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (And the HOUSE is the PLACE). The second goal was to examine prosody sensitivity as an individual difference variable. Measures in the research included: • Primer trials where participants were introduced to the idea of stylistically marked stressed by asking them to choose the better use of capitalization (“Sam needed to practice his bow with greater acCURacy/ACcuracy”). • A poetry memory test (a variation on a reading comprehension test in which participants were asked about specific words and phrases in a text) with a multiple choice question for each of twenty-four poems that the participant read. • A poet recognition test where participants sorted a list of 60 names in categories of famous poets or of other people, such as actors, political figures, and comedians. • A demographic questionnaire which asked the participants to report: their scores on a college admission screening test (ACT); cumulative grade point average
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