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Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR logoLink to Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research : JSLHR
. 2025 Nov 14;68(12):5950–5962. doi: 10.1044/2025_JSLHR-25-00313

Caregiver Oral Reading Prosody Is Associated With Preschoolers' Storybook Listening Comprehension

Kelsey E Davison a, Caroline Strang a, Helen Gray-Bauer a, Talia Liu a, Jennifer Zuk a,✉
PMCID: PMC12704921  PMID: 41237785

Abstract

Purpose:

Shared reading is one of the most language-enriched contexts in children's home environments. A salient, understudied characteristic of shared reading is caregiver oral reading prosody. While caregiver prosody in conversational contexts is linked to children's understanding of spoken language, it remains unclear whether caregivers' oral reading prosody relates to preschoolers' storybook listening comprehension.

Method:

The present study examined caregiver oral reading prosody in relation to preschool-age children's listening comprehension of book text. Thirty-eight caregivers read a children's book to their child (ages: 4–5 years) without extratextual discussion. Children then answered cued recall questions about the story and were assessed on broader listening comprehension skills via standardized assessment. The caregivers' reading prosody, including intonation/pitch (fundamental frequency [fo] mean, range, standard deviation) and timing (speech rate, appropriate and inappropriate pauses) features, were quantified from audio recordings of the interactions.

Results:

Findings revealed that caregiver fo range and appropriate pause duration were both positively associated with children's cued recall accuracy scores. Furthermore, the prosody measures significantly predicted unique variance in children's cued recall accuracy when controlling for child age, broader listening comprehension skills, attention, and caregiver education.

Conclusions:

Considering that listening comprehension is a well-established predictor of children's long-term academic success, this study carries implications for identifying factors that relate to children's comprehension of linguistic input prior to the start of formal schooling. Overall, results provide foundational insight about one specific, understudied caregiver reading technique that may help facilitate positive language outcomes for children.

Children's early language exposure is instrumental in shaping their language development, which has long-term impacts on later reading achievement and overall academic success (Rodriguez & Tamis-Lemonda, 2011; Weisleder & Fernald, 2013). Effective language exposure is contingent on the child's ability to listen and comprehend what is said, that is, listening comprehension. Listening comprehension refers to the ability to process, integrate, and access the meaning of what one hears (Hogan et al., 2014; Kendeou et al., 2005). As such, listening comprehension is a core component of early language skills that serves as one of the strongest predictors of subsequent school performance (Alonzo et al., 2016; Language and Reading Research Consortium, 2015). Child-centered, cognitive–linguistic factors (e.g., attention, working memory) have been established as early predictors of listening comprehension (Daneman & Merikle, 1996; Florit et al., 2013; Lepola et al., 2012; Lorch et al., 2000). However, there is surprisingly little work addressing to what extent external factors may impact the child's ability to comprehend linguistic input provided during language interaction.

Initial evidence suggests that prosodic variation in child-directed speech (CDS) supports preschool-age children's language comprehension skills by heightening syntactic boundaries within continuous speech streams (Foursha-Stevenson et al., 2017). Separate research has linked caregiver–child shared book reading to preschoolers' language comprehension (Sénéchal et al., 2008). This separate area of work highlights how language provided by children's books familiarizes children with vocabulary, morphosyntax, and concepts important for language comprehension (Leung, 2008; Montag, 2019; Montag et al., 2015; Pollard-Durodola et al., 2011). Despite evidence suggesting the importance of both CDS and shared reading for preschoolers' listening comprehension, limited research to date has examined the potential facilitative role of caregivers' prosody during shared reading interactions on children's storybook listening comprehension.

A long-standing body of literature emphasizes the importance of caregiver speech prosody, specifically in CDS, in facilitating language development in early childhood (Spinelli et al., 2017; Thiessen et al., 2005). In spoken communication, prosody plays an important role in conveying linguistic information through patterns of intonation/pitch, timing (e.g., the duration of words and pauses), and loudness (Cole, 2015). This information is relayed through changes in prosodic elements such as pitch contours, pauses, and speech rate (i.e., how fast or slow a speaker talks), which aid listeners in marking syntactic units and establishing focal content as they build a sentence's linguistic structure (for reviews, see Dahan, 2015; Wade-Woolley et al., 2021). Importantly, the use of exaggerated prosody in CDS supports young children's language comprehension and language acquisition (Foursha-Stevenson et al., 2017; Ma et al., 2011; Spinelli et al., 2017). Compared to the speech register of adult-directed speech, “prototypical” CDS is characterized by higher pitch, greater pitch variation, slower speech rate, and increased pause lengths (Nelson et al., 1989; Rosslund et al., 2024; Singh et al., 2002; Spinelli et al., 2017). Acoustic modifications of CDS are understood to sustain children's attention to linguistic input while simultaneously facilitating their processing of information in continuous speech streams (Kalashnikova et al., 2018; Ma et al., 2011; Nencheva et al., 2020; Thiessen et al., 2005). In turn, CDS aids children's understanding of spoken language in early childhood by supporting their phonemic, lexical, and grammatical acquisition (Foursha-Stevenson et al., 2017; Kuhl et al., 1997; Ma et al., 2011).

Although caregivers' use of CDS is known to shift as children mature (Englund & Behne, 2006; Rosslund et al., 2024), limited evidence suggests it continues to benefit children's language learning at the preschool age (Foursha-Stevenson et al., 2017). As children develop and their linguistic abilities advance, specific features of CDS can serve different functions. For example, 4- to 6-month-old infants are drawn to repetitive, short utterances with increased vowel durations, which help to increase sound discrimination of speech input (Kuhl et al., 1997; Liu et al., 2003; McRoberts et al., 2009; Segal & Newman, 2015). As children progress toward the toddler stage and their vocabularies expand, caregivers' use of short, repetitive, and elongated speech decreases while their continued use of high fundamental frequency (fo) variation supports children's word learning (Cox et al., 2023; Graf Estes & Hurley, 2013). Indeed, the use of wider pitch range in caregiver speech documented at the toddler stage has been suggested to enhance speech contrasts highlighting focal words to facilitate vocabulary growth (Benders, 2013; Ma et al., 2011; Rosslund et al., 2022, 2024).

While research examining relationships between CDS and language skills at the preschool stage is relatively limited (Kempe et al., 2024), initial evidence indicates that preschoolers benefit from prototypical CDS, particularly for morphosyntactic comprehension, as their grammatical skills develop. Specifically, using sentences that were grammatically advanced for preschoolers, Foursha-Stevenson et al. (2017) investigated whether typically developing preschool- and school-age children had better comprehension of sentences presented in CDS versus an adult-directed speech condition. Although both preschool- and school-age children demonstrated significantly better comprehension in the CDS versus the adult-directed speech condition, preschoolers performed above chance in the CDS condition only. This finding implies that CDS is closely linked to a young learner's stage of linguistic development and that it continues to benefit children's understanding, especially of morphosyntax, during the preschool years as they acquire more grammatically complex language (Tomasello, 2000). Furthermore, this evidence points toward a valuable role of CDS features for preschoolers' sentence-level listening comprehension, particularly within contexts that push the bounds of their language competencies.

One specific context in which caregivers' use of prosody could facilitate preschool-age children's listening comprehension is caregiver–child shared book reading. Collective evidence reveals shared reading as one of the most enriching contexts for language exposure in young children's home environments since it exposes them to more diverse vocabulary and complex syntax than everyday conversational interactions (Logan et al., 2019; Montag, 2019; Montag et al., 2015). For instance, research comparing language content provided in the text of children's books to transcripts of caregiver–child conversational speech samples showed that children's books contain higher frequencies of rarer and more complex sentence types (e.g., passive sentences, relative clauses; Montag, 2019). This evidence demonstrates how text in children's books offers a valuable opportunity for caregivers to provide enriching and advanced language exposure. Considering the language-rich components of shared reading, it is unsurprising that the amount of time caregivers spend reading to their children has been repeatedly and positively linked to child language skills such as vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and syntax comprehension (Bus et al., 1995; Crain-Thoreson & Dale, 1992; Sénéchal et al., 2008). However, it remains unclear to what extent a caregiver's use of prosody when reading to their child might support the child's understanding and acquisition of the advanced language provided by book text.

Surprisingly little research to date has investigated the role of caregiver oral reading prosody in shared reading interactions. In oral reading, prosody is understood to affect text comprehension by highlighting key content, marking grammatical and semantic structure, and breaking text into segments that are easier to maintain in working memory (Carlson et al., 2009; Frazier et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2021), not only for the reader but also the listener (Goldman et al., 2006; Mira & Schwanenflugel, 2013). Specifically, the use of prosodic cues such as pitch changes and intrasentential pauses at grammatical boundaries (i.e., appropriate pauses) when reading aloud signals the segmentation of text into meaningful units (Binder et al., 2013; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004). In fact, the ability to read aloud with grammatically appropriate intonation contours can facilitate text comprehension, whereas pause intrusions at locations not corresponding to grammatical boundaries (i.e., inappropriate pauses) can hinder text comprehension (Arcand et al., 2014; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2008; Schwanenflugel et al., 2004). Although some studies have used book stimuli to elicit CDS samples from caregivers interfacing with their infants (for a review, see Cox et al., 2023), specific consideration of the unique role of caregiver oral reading prosody within shared reading interactions has largely been overlooked. This highlights a knowledge gap in the literature, especially when considering evidence from a recent meta-analysis showing that speech properties of CDS can differ between read versus conversational speech contexts (Cox et al., 2023). Specifically, in studies profiling CDS using speech samples of caregiver reading, as compared to conversational CDS, caregivers were found to have slower speech rate. This finding has been suggested to result from caregivers' desire to ease cognitive–linguistic demands of book reading interactions for young children (Rosslund et al., 2024). Despite this, scarcely any research has addressed whether and how caregiver oral reading prosody may be associated with children's language skills.

To our knowledge, there has only been one study to examine whether a caregiver's use of oral reading prosody when reading to their child relates to the child's language skills. Initial investigation of shared reading interactions among mother–child dyads of late-talking and typically talking toddlers revealed that, across the whole group, caregivers' use of intonation when reading significantly and positively accounted for unique variance in the toddlers' receptive language skills (Zuk et al., 2025). Importantly, this finding was significant when controlling for demographic factors, including key socioeconomic indicators (e.g., maternal education) of the broad home environment commonly tied to children's early language development (Hoff, 2003; Rowe, 2008, 2018). This result has led to the working hypothesis that caregiver oral reading prosody may facilitate children's storybook listening comprehension by emphasizing focal content provided by the book text, which, in turn, might support early receptive language growth. Yet, there is a need to directly investigate whether and how caregiver oral reading prosody may relate to children's listening comprehension. This raises a lack of understanding in existing research that needs attention given that young children's listening comprehension is one of the strongest predictors of subsequent language comprehension and academic success at school age (Alonzo et al., 2016; Language and Reading Research Consortium, 2015).

Just two prior studies we know of have explored relationships between prosody and children's listening comprehension, both of which used digital experimental paradigms (Goldman et al., 2006; Mira & Schwanenflugel, 2013). The first tested whether prosody serves as a mnemonic device that aids fifth-grade children in recalling scientific content delivered via aurally presented stories; results indicated that the children were able to recall content more accurately when they were presented with greater prosodic variation (Goldman et al., 2006). Expanding on this initial evidence and of particular importance to the present work, Mira and Schwanenflugel (2013) found that more “expressive” versus “inexpressive” read-aloud recordings of storybooks positively impacted typically developing preschoolers' listening comprehension; that is, more “expressive” oral presentation, as indicated by greater fo variation, was associated with higher accuracy on comprehension questions probing children's recall of elements of the storyline. However, these studies have only examined oral reading prosody within the context of experimental paradigms using digital recordings. Therefore, there is a need to see whether these digital experimental paradigms may translate to more naturalistic contexts, particularly caregiver–child shared reading interactions, which provide children one of the most significant opportunities for novel and enriched language exposure prior to the start of formal schooling. Furthermore, given Mira and Schwanenflugel's focus on fo variation alone, whether timing aspects of prosodic reading (i.e., speech rate, pauses) relate to preschoolers' listening comprehension has yet to be investigated.

The primary aim of this study was to determine, among a cohort of caregiver–child dyads, whether caregiver oral reading prosody relates to children's listening comprehension of a storybook. To do this, we asked caregivers to read a children's book to their preschool-age child without discussing any storyline elements or pointing out details of the text nor images. Adapting the study design from Mira and Schwanenflugel (2013), children were asked cued recall questions about the story immediately following the reading interaction. Drawing on prior CDS literature emphasizing the role of intonation and timing/duration features of language input for child language development (Foursha-Stevenson et al., 2017; Ma et al., 2011; Spinelli et al., 2017), we acoustically analyzed caregivers' oral reading prosody—specifically, intonation (i.e., fo mean, range, and standard deviation) and timing/duration features (i.e., speech rate and the frequency and duration of appropriate and inappropriate pauses)—in relation to children's real-time storybook listening comprehension.

Based on emerging research demonstrating positive associations between caregiver intonation during shared book reading and children's language skills (Zuk et al., 2025), we hypothesized that intonation modulation would be positively associated with children's storybook listening comprehension, as measured by accuracy on cued recall questions. We further hypothesized that features of appropriate pausing would also show a positive relation to child listening comprehension, consistent with literature suggesting that pauses corresponding with syntactic boundaries can support comprehension by segmenting linguistic information into manageable units (Carlson et al., 2009; Frazier et al., 2006; Kim et al., 2021). In contrast, we expected inappropriate pauses to be negatively associated with children's cued recall accuracy. Finally, building on evidence postulating that slower caregiver speech rate during book reading may support children's language processing by allowing more time for language processing (Rosslund et al., 2024), we hypothesized that slower speech rate would be linked to higher cued recall accuracy. By examining caregiver oral reading prosody in relation to children's understanding of storybook text, this study provides valuable, preliminary insight into how oral reading prosody might be leveraged to support developmental trajectories of listening comprehension from an early age.

Method

Participants

Children (ages 4–5 years) and their parents/caregivers (referred to as caregivers) were recruited from the greater Boston, Massachusetts, area as part of a larger, longitudinal study of children's emergent language and literacy skills at Boston University. Of the initial 44 participants, a total of 38 caregiver–child dyads (child participants ranging in age from 49 to 70 months [Mage = 58.16 months, SD = 6.07], 18 assigned male at birth and 20 assigned female at birth; three male and 35 female caregivers) were included in the present investigation (see Table 1 for an overview of demographic information). Given the present focus on the relationship between caregivers' oral reading prosody and children's listening comprehension of a storybook, this study included dyads that completed a reading interaction in which the caregiver read the storybook The Magic Rabbit to their child without extratextual talk. Therefore, by necessity, six dyads were excluded due to not completing the reading interaction (n = 2), skipping book pages during the interaction (n = 2), not following directions/engaging in extratextual talk about the storyline (n = 1), or missing audio from the reading interaction (n = 1). All children met the following inclusion criteria: normal hearing; right-handed; full-term birth (> 36 weeks); native English speakers; no history of head injury or trauma, or neurological or other neuropsychological conditions; and nonverbal cognitive skills with standard scores greater than or equal to 85, as measured by the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test–Second Edition (Kaufman & Kaufman, 2004) Matrices subtest. The majority of children were in preschool, although seven children had recently started kindergarten. Notably, 10 out of 38 children included in the present analysis were considered “at risk” for speech-language and/or reading difficulties, as they met at least one of the following risk criteria: (a) had received speech-language therapy services such as early intervention, (b) had caregiver concern for speech-language skills, and (c) had at least one first-degree relative (i.e., biological sibling or caregiver) with reading difficulties per caregiver report. Before participation, caregivers provided written informed consent and children provided verbal assent. All procedures were approved by the Boston University Institutional Review Board (Project IRB No. 6111E).

Table 1.

Descriptive information (n = 38).

Variable M (SD)
Child age (months) 58.16 (6.07)
Child biological sex (M:F ratio) 9:10
Child CELF Sentence Comprehension (SS) 11.24 (2.77)
Child CTOPP Phonological Memory (SS) 101 (17.12)
Child attention (range: 1–4) 3.58 (0.64)
Child cued recall accuracy (range: 0–16) 6.50 (3.14)
Child race (%)
 White/Caucasian 24 (63%)
 Black/African American 3 (8%)
 Asian 2 (5%)
 More than one race 9 (24%)
Caregiver biological sex (M:F) 3:35
Caregiver education (%)
 Partial college (at least 1 year) 2 (5%)
 Undergraduate degree (college) 9 (24%)
 Graduate degree 27 (71%)
Caregiver shared reading measures
 fo mean (Hz) 205.47 (31.05)
 fo range (Hz) 168.75 (45.77)
 fo standard deviation (Hz) 41.35 (12.38)
 Speech rate (syllables/s) 4.04 (0.44)
 Appropriate pauses (total number) 14.61 (4.78)
 Mean appropriate pause duration (s) 0.39 (0.10)
 Inappropriate pauses (total number) 6.29 (5.41)
 Mean inappropriate pause duration (s) 0.29 (0.15)
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Note. CELF and CTOPP scores reflect age-standardized scores. M = male; F = female; CELF = Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool; SS = standard scores; CTOPP = Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing; fo = fundamental frequency.

Measures

Caregiver Oral Reading Prosody

Caregivers were asked to read the picture book The Magic Rabbit (Cate, 2009) aloud to their child without engaging in conversation (i.e., extratextual talk) nor pointing to any features of the book images and text. Specifically, they were instructed to read only the printed text and, if interrupted by their child, to return to reading without engaging in conversation. Caregivers were also asked not to discuss the storyline or interact verbally with their child during the reading, and not to point to elements of the book. All caregivers included in the analyses read the book text aloud without engaging in extratextual discussion. Notably, this was the same storybook used in a prior experimental paradigm using digital read-aloud recordings to probe relationships between reading prosody and children's listening comprehension (Mira & Schwanenflugel, 2013). Prior to starting, all caregivers and children confirmed that they were not familiar with the book.

Audiovisual recordings were acquired during the caregivers' reading and were used to extract oral reading prosody measures using Praat software (Version 6.4.29; Boersma & Weenink, 2020). Book reading utterances were transcribed by trained research staff in Praat TextGrids and divided into segments that comprised complete sentences. In instances where a sentence was split between two pages separated by a page turn, utterances were transcribed into phrases. Transcriptions were completed by trained graduate students, and interrater reliability was conducted with 20% of the sample, which yielded intraclass correlation coefficients > .90. All caregivers' reading skills were within normal limits (standard scores > 90), as indicated by averaging standard scores across select subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests, Third Edition (Woodcock, 2011). Based on literature linking timing and intonation to ones' own understanding of the text among adults (Binder et al., 2013), complemented by initial findings suggesting a similar effect of intonation during oral reading on children's text comprehension (Mira & Schwanenflugel, 2013), both timing and intonation measures were quantified from the caregivers' oral reading. Importantly, all caregiver utterances included in the analysis reflected direct reading from the printed text, and prosody measures specifically captured variation in intonation and timing features (i.e., intonation variation, speech rate, and pause duration) of these read-aloud segments.

For timing features of caregiver oral reading prosody, key measures of interest selected for the present analysis included speech rate and pause time quantified in terms of average duration, grammatical appropriateness, and the total number of within-utterance pauses. All pauses were defined as a silence > 100 ms (Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2008) and coded on a separate Praat tier. Furthermore, pauses were categorized as appropriate or inappropriate. Appropriate pauses included pauses representing grammatical boundaries corresponding with a comma (clause-final, phrase-final, list), an ellipsis, or a quotation mark (Álvarez-Cañizo et al., 2020; Binder et al., 2013). Appropriate pauses also included predetermined locations before coordinating conjunctions (“and,” “or”) that did not have corresponding punctuation within the text but represented phrasal boundaries where readers may reasonably pause (Benjamin & Schwanenflugel, 2010). Pauses for emphatic purposes within two predetermined sentences within the book were also coded as appropriate, given prior literature demonstrating that appropriate emphatic pause placement can increase comprehension among listeners (Ahmed et al., 2024). All other within-utterance pauses were coded as inappropriate, including pauses occurring both between and within words, in line with prior research (Arcand et al., 2014; Binder et al., 2013). Lastly, pauses were excluded from analysis when they were caused by child interruption.

A custom Python script was employed to extract speech rate (in syllables per second), appropriate and inappropriate pause durations (in seconds), and the number of appropriate and inappropriate pauses from each utterance, using the Python library textgrid (https://github.com/kylebgorman/textgrid) to parse Praat TextGrids. Syllable counting was automated using the Python library syllapy (https://github.com/mholtzscher/syllapy) and manually verified. Speech rate, appropriate pause duration, and inappropriate pause duration values were averaged across utterances for each participant.

Intonation features of caregiver oral reading prosody included intonation mean, range, and standard deviation, in line with evidence suggesting positive effects of fo variation and higher mean fo in an oral presentation of a storybook on children's language skills in early childhood (Mira & Schwanenflugel, 2013; Zuk et al., 2025). Praat pitch tracking and a Praat script were used to extract all intonation measures by utterance. The Praat pitch window was initially set to 130–400 Hz for female caregivers and 70–250 Hz for male caregivers based on previous research tracking pitch in adults (Patel et al., 2020). Thereafter, audiovisual inspection of the pitch tracking was completed by trained research personnel for each utterance and pitch settings were adjusted as needed to ensure proper fo tracking and thus alignment of the glottal pulses marked by Praat prior to extracting final output. To account for the nonlinear relationship between fo in Hz and the perception of pitch, statistical analyses were conducted using fo values that had been converted into semitones in accordance with a conversion formula used in prior literature (Dahl & Stepp, 2023).

Children's Cued Recall of the Storybook

Immediately following the caregivers' oral reading of the storybook, caregivers were escorted out of the room and research personnel asked the child cued recall questions to assess listening comprehension of the text. The same cued recall questions and scoring guidelines were adapted from a previously established listening comprehension paradigm (Mira & Schwanenflugel, 2013). Eight comprehension questions included four plot-based and four inference-based questions. All responses were scored on a 3-point scale ranging from 0 to 2 points, with a completely correct response earning 2 points, a partially correct response earning 1 point, and a completely incorrect response earning 0 points. The scoring rubric explicitly outlined information required for full credit. Partial credit for (a) plot-based questions corresponded with responses that provided either some but not all of the required information and (b) inference-based questions partial credit corresponded with alternative yet less plausible interpretations of story events. Completely incorrect responses did not match predefined answers and, thus, included false information or implausible interpretations. The total cued recall score comprised the sum of the eight question scores, with a maximum score of 16. Interrater reliability for cued recall scores was conducted between two raters with 20% of the sample, and an intraclass correlation coefficient of .93 was achieved.

Standardized Measures of Children's Language and Cognitive Abilities

Child participants completed select subtests from the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool–Third Edition (CELF Preschool-3; Wiig et al., 2020). To account for variation in children's broader oral comprehension skills in the present investigation, scores from the Sentence Comprehension subtest of the CELF Preschool-3 were used as a control variable as this subtest measures the ability to interpret spoken sentences of increasing length and complexity. Moreover, children's phonological memory skills were assessed through the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing–Second Edition (Wagner et al., 2013). The phonological memory composite score is derived from scores on two subtests: Memory for Digits and Nonword Repetition. The Memory for Digits subtest assesses children's ability to accurately repeat a series of orally presented numbers, while the Nonword Repetition subtest assesses temporary storage and manipulation of mental representations of information by having children listen to and repeat back made-up, nonsense words (nonwords).

Caregiver Education

Given previous literature demonstrating relationships between caregiver education, caregiver language input, and child language skills (Hoff, 2003; Rowe, 2008, 2018), education was employed as a key caregiver-level factor to control for in the present study. Caregiver participants reported their level of education on a 7-point scale with the following options: 1 (less than 7th grade), 2 (junior high/middle school [9th grade]), 3 (partial high school [10th or 11th grade]), 4 (high school graduate), 5 (partial college [at least 1 year]), 6 (undergraduate degree [college]), or 7 (graduate degree). In line with prior research accounting for impacts of caregiver education levels on children's language skills, values were converted into a quasicontinuous variable reflecting education in number of years (Huttenlocher et al., 2010; Nikolaeva et al., 2024; Zuk et al., 2025).

Child Attention During the Caregiver–Child Reading Interaction

To account for potential confounds of children's attentional skills in the reading interaction, children's engagement levels during the reading interaction were coded. To do this, we used the Children's Orientation to Book Reading Scale (Kaderavek et al., 2014), which provides a 4-point global rating of literacy orientation based on children's engagement and focused attention. A trained graduate research assistant watched a video recording of each dyad's reading interaction and used the rubric to rate the child on engagement behaviors (e.g., posture, distractibility) on a scale from 1 to 4, with higher scores representing increased orientation behaviors indicating engagement and attention. Interrater reliability for the global rating with a second trained coder was 95% as determined by the intraclass correlation for 20% of the sample.

Statistical Analyses

Statistical analyses were executed using R (Version 2024.04.1 + 748; https://www.r-project.org), and parametric statistics were used in continuous analyses since all variables met normality assumptions based on Kolmogorov–Smirnov tests of normality. Correlation analyses were conducted between caregiver prosody measures and children's cued recall scores to evaluate whether caregiver oral reading prosody measures were associated with children's listening comprehension of the storybook. To account for potential variation in oral reading prosody attributed to caregiver sex, Welch's t tests were first conducted to compare intonation and timing features of prosody between male and female caregivers. For caregiver prosody measures that significantly differed by sex, caregiver sex was employed as a control variable in correlation analyses with children's cued recall scores. In these cases, caregiver sex was regressed out of caregiver prosody measures in a separate linear regression model, and the residual output was then used for the correlational test.

Caregiver oral reading prosody variables showing significant associations with children's cued recall accuracy scores were then submitted to a stepwise multiple regression model to examine the extent to which they contributed to the prediction of children's listening comprehension of the storybook while accounting for key control variables. As a first step in the regression model, the effects of child age, broader listening comprehension skills, and phonological memory skills on cued recall accuracy of the storybook were tested as predictor variables. Variables showing significant effects on the dependent variable (i.e., child cued recall accuracy scores) were then included in remaining regression model steps. In Step 2, key control variables (i.e., caregiver education and child attention during the caregiver–child reading interaction) were included as additional control predictors of interest. In a final step (Step 3), caregiver oral reading prosody variables specified in correlation analyses were incorporated as the predictor variables of interest to test their contribution to children's cued recall accuracy (dependent variable), while accounting for the impacts of the control factors introduced in prior steps.

Model comparisons were conducted using analyses of variance to test whether the addition of predictors significantly improved model fit. Effect sizes for the stepwise multiple regression model were estimated using Cohen's conventions, with f2 of 0.02, 0.15, and 0.35, indicative of small, moderate, and large effects (Cohen, 1988).

Results

Prior to correlation analyses, Welch's t tests were used to determine whether caregiver sex should be controlled for in analyses using caregiver prosody measures. Results indicated that caregiver sex significantly related to total number of inappropriate pauses (t = 3.937, p = .004) and mean fo (t = 10.416, p < .001). Caregiver sex did not relate to pause duration variables, total number of appropriate pauses, fo range, and fo standard deviation. Therefore, sex was employed as a control variable in correlation analyses for the total number of inappropriate pauses and mean fo only. Subsequent correlation analyses between caregiver oral reading prosody measures and children's cued recall accuracy of the storybook reading revealed significant, positive relationships between children's cued recall accuracy scores and two caregiver prosody measures: the average duration of appropriate pauses (hereafter referred to as “appropriate pause duration”; r = .34, p = .036) and fo range (r = .35, p = .031). No further relationships were indicated (for a full review of correlation results, see Table 2).

Table 2.

Correlation analyses with children's cued recall accuracy scores.

Variable r p
Total no. of appropriate pauses .25 .120
Appropriate pause duration .34 .036*
Total no. of inappropriate pausesa .01 .962
Inappropriate pause duration .02 .882
Speech rate −.02 .892
f o meana .04 .812
f o range .35 .031*
f o standard deviation .28 .081
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Note. fo = fundamental frequency.

a

Correlations controlling for caregiver sex.

*

p < .05.

A stepwise regression model with children's cued recall accuracy scores as the outcome variable was then conducted using the caregiver oral reading prosody variables indicated in correlation analyses (i.e., appropriate pause duration, intonation range) as the predictor variables of interest. In Step 1, the inclusion of child age, broader listening comprehension skills, and phonological memory skills as predictors resulted in a model that explained 38.6% of the variance in cued recall accuracy scores (R2 = .386, p = .002), with a large effect size (f2 = 0.62). Child age (β = .196, p = .016) and broader listening comprehension skills (β = .352, p = .036) were significant, individual predictors. Child phonological memory skills was not a significant predictor (β = .026, p = .358). Therefore, for parsimony, subsequent steps in the regression model were performed without the inclusion of child phonological memory skills. In Step 2, adding child attention during the reading interaction and caregiver education as key control predictors resulted in a model explaining 43.8% in child cued recall accuracy scores with a large effect size (f2 = 0.78), though ΔR2 (5%) did not reach statistical significance, F(1, 33) = 2.58, p = .071. There was a significant, positive effect of caregiver education (β = .850, p = .041) and a trending (p < .10), positive effect of child attention (β = .191, p = .080). Therefore, both variables were maintained in the model. The final model (Step 3), adding caregiver intonation range and appropriate pause duration while reading, increased the overall prediction to 60% with a large effect size (f2 = 1.50). Importantly, the ΔR2 (16.2%) was statistically significant, F(2, 31) = 6.08, p = .006, and both caregiver intonation range (β = .395, p = .039) and appropriate pause duration (β = 8.980, p = .041) were significant predictors (see Table 3 for the final model and Figure 1).

Table 3.

Prediction of children's storybook listening comprehension.

DV: Child cued recall accuracy scores β SE t p
Intercept −36.292 7.420 −4.891 .000
Child age (months) .243 0.065 3.714 .001
Child CELF Sentence Comprehension (SS) .452 0.140 1.819 .079
Child attention (range: 1–4) .153 1.582 0.968 .341
Caregiver education (years) .960 0.356 2.697 .011
Caregiver appropriate pause duration (s) 8.980 4.211 2.133 .041
Caregiver fo range (ST) .395 0.184 2.151 .039
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Note. R2 = .601, adjusted R2 = .508, p < .001. Predictors were entered hierarchically: Step 1 (R2 = .386) included child age, CELF sentence comprehension, and CTOPP phonological memory (the latter was removed in subsequent steps for a more parsimonious model); Step 2 added child attention and caregiver education (ΔR2 = .050); Step 3 added caregiver oral reading prosody variables (ΔR2 = .162). Reported beta coefficients reflect the final model with all predictors included. CELF = Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals Preschool; SS = standard scores; fo = fundamental frequency; ST = semitones.

Figure 1.

The image displays 2 scatterplots. A. In the first plot, the y-axis represents the child cued recall accuracy score in residuals and the x-axis represents the caregiver appropriate pause duration in residuals. The regression line shows a positive correlation between the 2 variables and it runs between (negative 0.1, negative 2.5) and (0.2, 2.5). Parameter r equals 0.34. B. In the second plot, the y-axis represents the child cued recall accuracy score in residuals and the x-axis represents the caregiver f subscript o range in residuals. The regression line shows a positive correlation between the variables and it runs between (negative 5, negative 2.9) and (2.5, 0.5). Parameter r equals 0.35.

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Scatter plots depicting residual values for relationships between children's cued recall accuracy scores on storybook comprehension questions and (A) caregiver appropriate pause duration in seconds and (B) caregiver fo range in semitones, accounting for child age, broader listening comprehension skills, attention during the reading interaction, and caregiver education.

Discussion

This study investigated how caregivers' oral reading prosody when reading a children's book aloud to their child relates to their children's listening comprehension of the storybook. Of the acoustic oral reading prosody features presently examined, significant associations were indicated for intonation range and the average duration of appropriate pauses (hereafter referred to as “appropriate pause duration”). In accordance with our hypotheses, intonation range and appropriate pause duration in the caregivers' oral reading were positively associated with children's scores on cued recall questions about the storyline such that wider intonation ranges and longer appropriate pause durations were associated with better comprehension scores. Moreover, caregiver intonation range and appropriate pause duration both significantly predicted unique variance in children's cued recall accuracy scores when accounting for caregiver education as well as children's age, broader listening comprehension skills, and attention during the reading interaction. Potential confounding effects of book familiarity and storyline discussion may be ruled out since all dyads included in present analyses were unfamiliar with the book and did not engage in extratextual discussion during the reading interaction. Overall, these findings illuminate the importance of considering caregiver oral reading prosody as a salient factor that appears to facilitate young children's comprehension of linguistic input provided by book text during caregiver–child shared reading interactions.

The present investigation sheds light on a specific pathway through which oral reading prosody may foster children's language skill development. Importantly, this work directly builds upon one key prior study that employed a controlled experimental paradigm in which preschoolers demonstrated better storybook listening comprehension when book text was presented in “expressive,” as indicated by greater fo variation, versus “inexpressive” read-aloud recordings (Mira & Schwanenflugel, 2013). Using the same storybook and corresponding comprehension questions from this experimental work, the present findings indicate that this positive relationship between intonation variation and listening comprehension is also evident in a more “real-world” context of caregiver–child shared reading. Notably, these findings are also directly in line with initial evidence linking caregivers' intonation use during shared reading to toddlers' receptive language skills (Zuk et al., 2025). Taken together, converging evidence supports the notion that intonation features of oral reading prosody may promote children's listening comprehension during reading interactions, which, in turn, could facilitate children's receptive language skill development.

Although positive impacts of “prototypical” CDS are thought to diminish as children's language skills develop in toddlerhood (Ma et al., 2011), findings from the present study raise the possibility that certain prosodic features, such as exaggerated fo variation, may continue to support preschoolers' listening comprehension. This evidence converges with separate work suggesting that prosody in CDS still matters, particularly for comprehension of grammatically complex sentences, as preschool-age children's morphosyntactic skills develop (Foursha-Stevenson et al., 2017). Importantly, research proposes that children benefit most from prosodic cues in CDS when pushed to the bounds of their language competencies (Foursha-Stevenson et al., 2017; Ma et al., 2011). Relatedly, shared reading is one specific context in which young children are introduced to complex sentence structures and diverse vocabulary rarely encountered in everyday conversation interactions (Logan et al., 2019; Montag, 2019; Montag et al., 2015). Although this study did not assess the syntactic complexity of the book text used in analyses, preliminary findings offer promising evidence that shared reading—given the advanced language typically present in book text—may serve as a distinct context in which prototypical CDS characteristics in caregivers' oral reading prosody continue to support children's language comprehension. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that both caregiver prosody and children's storybook listening comprehension may be shaped by broader home literacy practices, including the frequency of shared reading and caregivers' language and reading skills. Moreover, given variability in children's language profiles in the present study, which includes a subset of children identified as at risk for speech-language or reading difficulties, the relationship between prosody and comprehension may differ depending on child-level language skills. Thus, future work is needed to better disentangle possible interrelated contributions of caregiver prosody, caregiver skill, broad shared reading exposure over time, and child language skills.

Beyond the presently observed finding reinforcing the significance of intonation-related prosodic features, this study extends previous research by establishing a relationship between caregiver pauses while reading and children's storybook listening comprehension. Although the Mira and Schwanenflugel (2013) investigation provided foundational insight into the potential impact of intonation variation in oral reading on children's listening comprehension, the study did not address timing aspects of prosodic reading (i.e., speech rate, pauses). We aimed to address this gap by quantifying caregiver speech rate when reading to their child, as well as exploring possible differential effects of appropriate (i.e., grammatical) and inappropriate pauses in the present study. As hypothesized, we revealed a positive association between appropriate pausing, specifically appropriate pause duration, and children's listening comprehension. This finding aligns with separate literature suggesting that grammatical pauses aids listeners in accessing underlying linguistic structure of spoken language (Dahan, 2015; Wade-Woolley et al., 2021). Specifically, prosody has been described as a core feature of the organizational structure of speech (Dahan, 2015), with features such as pauses helping to signal grammatical boundaries and phrase-level structure (Wade-Woolley et al., 2021); by marking syntactic and informational units, prosody guides listeners' interpretation of sentence structure and supports segmentation of the speech stream in ways that reflect underlying grammatical organization (Dahan, 2015). Increased pause lengths in CDS are also understood to support children's ability to locate phrase and clause boundaries in continuous speech streams (Nelson et al., 1989; Thiessen et al., 2005). With current findings linking caregivers' appropriate pause duration to children's understanding of storybook text, it is possible that elongated pauses surrounding grammatical units may have aided children in establishing linguistic relationships and focus within the storyline. Thus, the present findings support a working hypothesis that appropriate pause use during oral reading may help promote children's listening comprehension, but future longitudinal and intervention work with controlled paradigms are needed to better understand the causal nature of this connection. Specifically, future experimental studies in which appropriate pauses are manipulated in read-aloud recordings may offer a promising next step for clarifying the unique role of pauses in caregiver oral reading prosody for children's listening comprehension.

Although appropriate pause duration was indicated in relation to children's listening comprehension, no effects were observed for additional timing measures, namely, inappropriate pauses nor speech rate. Previous literature characterizes slower speaking rate as a CDS feature predominantly used with infants (Rosslund et al., 2024; Spinelli et al., 2017). In line with this work, we had hypothesized that slower caregiver speech rate might provide preschoolers more language processing time, for it has also been suggested that caregivers may reduce speech rate when reading to their child to ease children's cognitive–linguistic demands during reading interactions (Cox et al., 2023; Rosslund et al., 2024). To our knowledge, only one prior study has directly investigated caregiver speech rate during shared reading in relation to children's language skills (Zuk et al., 2025). No effects of speech rate were observed, just as no effects of speech rate were indicated in the present investigation. Considering how both of these findings stem from global, overall indicators of speech rate across storybook utterances, future research may benefit from more “local” consideration of whether durational changes at word- or phrase-levels impact children's language comprehension.

Concerning the null findings among inappropriate pause measures, this was also contrary to our hypotheses since we expected the frequency and duration of inappropriate pauses to negatively relate to children's listening comprehension. Prior literature indicates that the presence of longer and more frequent inappropriate pauses can hinder text comprehension (Arcand et al., 2014; Binder et al., 2013; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2008). However, it is noteworthy that this prior work exclusively focused on the comprehension of the reader, rather than the listener. Furthermore, the “readers” investigated were children just learning how to read (Arcand et al., 2014; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2008) and adults with low literacy skills (Binder et al., 2013). Since all caregivers included in present analyses demonstrated reading skills within normal limits, it is possible that the lack of findings specific to inappropriate pauses may be attributed to minimal variation in caregiver reading performance. Caregiver education level was also relatively high in this sample, with the majority of caregivers holding graduate degrees. Therefore, our findings are to be contextualized within the current sample of typically reading caregivers with high educational attainment. Future work focused on caregivers with reading difficulties will be crucial to determine whether caregiver reading difficulties may manifest in caregiver–child reading interactions via oral reading prosody and, in turn, impact children's storybook listening comprehension.

The present findings are to be interpreted in the context of several limitations. While our findings expand on previous experimental research implicating intonation variation in facilitating listening comprehension among a larger cohort of preschool-age children (Mira & Schwanenflugel, 2013), it is important to acknowledge the modest sample size in the present study. In addition, the high level of educational attainment among caregivers in the present sample is not reflective of the distribution in the general population. This may limit the generalizability of findings, as families with different literacy practices or fewer resources may engage in shared reading interactions differently (Weisleder & Marchman, 2018). Follow-up investigation with a larger and more demographically diverse sample is warranted to test replication with greater statistical power and to further examine the potential contributions of oral reading prosody across a broad range of home literacy contexts. It is also important to note that the present study solely focused on acoustic features of caregivers' prosody during the reading interaction. Research has indicated that speakers can employ visual cues (e.g., head nods, eyebrow movements) to emphasize words or speech rhythms during dyadic interactions, which, beyond acoustic cues, might further increase the perceptual salience of linguistic content (Krahmer & Swerts, 2007). Therefore, future work examining both spoken and visual cues of caregivers' reading presentation in relation to children's storybook listening comprehension would provide valuable insight into whether and how these factors might work in tandem to support children's understanding of storybook text.

While the present study focused on children's listening comprehension using plot- and inference-based recall questions, future work should examine whether additional aspects of prosody, such as iconic prosody in which intonation and timing/duration are modulated to reflect semantic meaning (Berman et al., 2013; Perlman et al., 2014), might support other language domains such as vocabulary growth. Importantly, the prosodic features associated with children's listening comprehension in this study are also hallmark characteristics of “prototypical” CDS, which has been shown to support early vocabulary learning in nonreading contexts (Foursha-Stevenson et al., 2017; Ma et al., 2011; Spinelli et al., 2017). Bridging the present findings with the broader body of literature investigating facilitative effects of CDS, future research is needed to clarify whether caregiver oral reading prosody may facilitate vocabulary development, particularly within the language-rich context of shared reading. Lastly, given the present characterization of acoustic features of prosody at the utterance level, further investigation using more fine-grained quantification of oral reading is warranted to better understand how speech rate and intonation changes within utterances or specific pause types (e.g., clausal, emphatic) might impact children's listening comprehension.

Conclusions

In summary, this is the first study to demonstrate that caregiver oral reading prosody relates to preschool-age children's storybook listening comprehension among a cohort of caregiver–child dyads. Building on separate experimental work, which established that greater intonation variation in read-aloud storybook recordings results in better listening comprehension among preschoolers (Mira & Schwanenflugel, 2013), the present study provides fundamental insight as to how this may translate to more “real-world” contexts of shared reading interactions. Moreover, through the novel consideration of the potential role(s) of timing aspects of caregiver oral reading prosody, findings reveal that elongated appropriate pauses also positively relate to children's listening comprehension. While the present study design precludes causal interpretation, results support a working hypothesis that oral reading prosody may provide a facilitative effect on young children's comprehension of advanced linguistic content provided during reading interactions. With preschool-age listening comprehension skills serving as a key predictor of children's subsequent academic success (Alonzo et al., 2016; Language and Reading Research Consortium, 2015), this study illuminates caregiver oral reading prosody as a key factor that may maximize children's comprehension of linguistic input provided by book text prior to the start of formal schooling. Overall, the present findings offer essential insights that carry implications for early intervention strategies designed to promote positive language outcomes for young children.

Data Availability Statement

The data sets generated and analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author upon request and after additional analyses are completed.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Dyslexia Foundation (Jennifer Zuk), National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant T32 DC013017 (Kelsey E. Davison and Talia Liu were supported by T32 to Cara Stepp), a Boston University Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences Student Research Grant (Kelsey E. Davison), and an American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarship (Kelsey E. Davison). The authors thank all participating families for their contribution to the study; Kimberly Dahl, Ayelet Kershenbaum, and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel for providing training on prosody analyses; and Laura Doherty, Aiko Jones, Marion Kalina Heinrich, and Mercedes Valladares for their contributions to data collection and processing.

Funding Statement

This work was supported by the Dyslexia Foundation (Jennifer Zuk), National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant T32 DC013017 (Kelsey E. Davison and Talia Liu were supported by T32 to Cara Stepp), a Boston University Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences Student Research Grant (Kelsey E. Davison), and an American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation New Century Scholars Doctoral Scholarship (Kelsey E. Davison).

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Associated Data

This section collects any data citations, data availability statements, or supplementary materials included in this article.

Data Availability Statement

The data sets generated and analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author upon request and after additional analyses are completed.

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