The Relationship of Prosodic Reading to Reading Rate and Other Constructs of Reading Ability

This study reports how well the results of an adapted rating scale of fluent reading would correspond to objective measures of those same readings. A trained investigating team listened to taped recordings of fourth- and fifth-grade students reading fourth- and fifth-grade texts. The team used the adjusted rating scale to evaluate the prosodic quality of the reading. Results from the prosody rating scale produced distinct groups of fluent readers, from which descriptive profiles for each group were developed. In addition, statistical cluster analysis procedures were used to form fluency groups based on objective measures of reading rate, reading accuracy, and number of pauses. Discriminant function analyses revealed that all three measures predicted fluency group membership, but reading rate and pauses were much better predictors than reading accuracy. Comparisons between groups formed by subjective prosody ratings and groups formed from the cluster analyses showed a high degree of overlap and agreement, validating the prosody ratings. Results from this study suggest that rating scales can be used accurately and productively in measuring young readers’ fluency and prosody. In addition, the data reveal that the online measure of reading rate is a valid and reliable proxy measure for reading fluency

Effects of Phrase-Reading Ability, Syntactic Awareness, and Reading Rate on Reading Comprehension of Adolescent Readers in an Alternative Setting

Many adolescent readers do not acquire adequate reading skills, and over the past 40 years reading scores for adolescent students have not improved (Edmonds, Vaughn, Wexler, Reutebuch, & Cable, 2009; Lee, Grigg, & Donahue, 2007). The purposes of this study were (a) to explore the relationships among phrase-reading ability, passage reading rate, syntactic awareness and reading comprehension of students attending an alternative school, and (b) to investigate whether phrase-reading ability serves as a mediator (i.e., the mechanism that accounts for the relationship between the predictor and the criterion) between reading rate and comprehension, and between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension. Theories of automaticity (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985) and the structural precedence hypothesis (Koriat, Greenberg, & Kreiner, 2002) provide the theoretical basis for this investigation. To investigate the relation among reading rate, syntactic awareness, phrase-reading ability, and comprehension, a series of assessments was conducted with 70 students who attend an alternative school. The resulting data were analyzed using correlation analysis, hierarchical regression (Pedhazur, 1997), and mediation regression (Baron & Kenny, 1984). The hypotheses for adolescent readers in an alternative setting are: (a) Phrase-reading ability, syntactic awareness, passage reading rate, and reading comprehension will have a positive, significant correlation; (b) Language related variables (i.e., phrasing ability, syntactic awareness) will account for more of the variance in reading comprehension than passage reading rate; (c) Phrase-reading ability, as measured by phrase-level prosody, provides a mechanism or at least partially mediates how passage reading rate affects reading comprehension; (d) Phrase-reading ability, as measured by phrase-level prosody, provides a mechanism or at least partially mediates how syntactic awareness affects reading comprehension. Findings confirmed all hypotheses. Based on these findings, researchers should further investigate contributions that language related skills such as phrase-reading ability and syntactic awareness make to reading comprehension for adolescent readers and whether these findings when disaggregated hold true for students with disabilities and struggling adolescent readers. This investigation brought attention to the need for a standardized terminology concerning reading fluency

Fluency in Early Childhood: Contributions from the Research to Support Emerging and Struggling Readers

This article examines the research regarding fluency and its impact on struggling readers. Fluency is a key component of reading instructions for all learners. It encompasses the students’ ability to read with automaticity, accuracy, and prosody for understanding. Research suggests that struggling readers have difficulty when fluency is weak, which impacts comprehension and cognitive resources. The examination of the literature yielded targeted interventions focused on fluency improves reading for students with reading difficulties

Conceptual graph-based knowledge representation for supporting reasoning in African traditional medicine

Although African patients use both conventional or modern and traditional healthcare simultaneously, it has been proven that 80% of people rely on African traditional medicine (ATM). ATM includes medical activities stemming from practices, customs and traditions which were integral to the distinctive African cultures. It is based mainly on the oral transfer of knowledge, with the risk of losing critical knowledge. Moreover, practices differ according to the regions and the availability of medicinal plants. Therefore, it is necessary to compile tacit, disseminated and complex knowledge from various Tradi-Practitioners (TP) in order to determine interesting patterns for treating a given disease. Knowledge engineering methods for traditional medicine are useful to model suitably complex information needs, formalize knowledge of domain experts and highlight the effective practices for their integration to conventional medicine. The work described in this paper presents an approach which addresses two issues. First it aims at proposing a formal representation model of ATM knowledge and practices to facilitate their sharing and reusing. Then, it aims at providing a visual reasoning mechanism for selecting best available procedures and medicinal plants to treat diseases. The approach is based on the use of the Delphi method for capturing knowledge from various experts which necessitate reaching a consensus. Conceptual graph formalism is used to model ATM knowledge with visual reasoning capabilities and processes. The nested conceptual graphs are used to visually express the semantic meaning of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) constructs that are useful for formal specification of temporal properties of ATM domain knowledge. Our approach presents the advantage of mitigating knowledge loss with conceptual development assistance to improve the quality of ATM care (medical diagnosis and therapeutics), but also patient safety (drug monitoring)

Sporthesia: Augmenting Sports Videos Using Natural Language

Augmented sports videos, which combine visualizations and video effects to present data in actual scenes, can communicate insights engagingly and thus have been increasingly popular for sports enthusiasts around the world. Yet, creating augmented sports videos remains a challenging task, requiring considerable time and video editing skills. On the other hand, sports insights are often communicated using natural language, such as in commentaries, oral presentations, and articles, but usually lack visual cues. Thus, this work aims to facilitate the creation of augmented sports videos by enabling analysts to directly create visualizations embedded in videos using insights expressed in natural language. To achieve this goal, we propose a three-step approach - 1) detecting visualizable entities in the text, 2) mapping these entities into visualizations, and 3) scheduling these visualizations to play with the video - and analyzed 155 sports video clips and the accompanying commentaries for accomplishing these steps. Informed by our analysis, we have designed and implemented Sporthesia, a proof-of-concept system that takes racket-based sports videos and textual commentaries as the input and outputs augmented videos. We demonstrate Sporthesia's applicability in two exemplar scenarios, i.e., authoring augmented sports videos using text and augmenting historical sports videos based on auditory comments. A technical evaluation shows that Sporthesia achieves high accuracy (F1-score of 0.9) in detecting visualizable entities in the text. An expert evaluation with eight sports analysts suggests high utility, effectiveness, and satisfaction with our language-driven authoring method and provides insights for future improvement and opportunities.Comment: 10 pages, IEEE VIS conferenc

A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW OF INTONATION: PSYCHOACOUSTICS MODELING OF PROSODIC PROMINENCE

Bolinger (1978:475), one of the foremost authorities on prosody of a generation ago, said that “Intonation is a half-tamed savage. To understand the tamed or linguistically harnessed half of him, one has to make friends with the wild half.” This review provides a brief explanation for the tamed and untamed halves of intonation. It is argued here that the pitch-centered approach that has been used for several decades is responsible for why one half of intonation remains untamed. To tame intonation completely, a holistic acoustic approach is required that takes intensity and duration as seriously as it does pitch. Speech is a three-dimensional physical entity in which all three correlates work independently and interdependently. Consequently, a methodology that addresses intonation comprehensively is more likely to yield better results. Psychoacoustics seems to be well positioned for this task. Nearly 100 years of experimentations have led to the discoveries of Just Noticeable Difference (JNDs) thresholds that can be summoned to help tame intonation completely. The framework discussed here expands the analytical resources and facilitates an optimal description of intonation. It calculates and ranks the relative functional load (RFL) of pitch, intensity, and duration, and uses the results to compute the melodicity score of utterances. The findings replicate, based on JNDs, how the naked ear perceives intonation on a four-point Likert melodicity scale