Distinguishing Function Words from Content Words in Children’s Oral Reading

BY THE TIME they enter first grade, children acquiring language in a home where English is spoken typically show the English prosodic pattern in which content words receive stress but function words do not. However, when some of these children read text aloud, it is perceived as choppy, awkward, and word-by-word, without meaningful phrasal groupings and lacking appropriate expression, as if they are reading a word list (Weber 2006). A major factor contributing to the impression of word-by-word reading appears to be the lack of a stress distinction between content words and function words. To investigate this interpretation, we performed