Acento léxico y ritmo en la lectura: aprender a distinguir entre palabras funcionales y de contenido
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/isl.20.2.2025.20620Keywords:
academic reading, teacher training, digital reading, reading media, reader profilesAbstract
This research aims to characterize the ability of textual organization during oral reading in Spanish-speaking students in 3rd, 5th, and 6th grades of primary education. It focuses on studying how learners group function and content words into rhythmic units, which involves strategic use of lexical stress, and varied application of suprasegmental and segmental phonetic resources. The analysis contrasts these acoustic parameters between the unstressed vowel of function words and the stressed vowel of content words in the reading of a narrative text in a sample of 90 students, who were native speakers of Rioplatense Spanish. The results indicate that as school grade levels advance, students show greater differentiation in the phonetic realization of function and content words, reflecting progress in the acquisition of rhythmic organization during oral reading. This suggests that during schooling, the ability to group words into coherent prosodic units develops increasingly, which promotes more fluent and expressive reading. Moreover, the stress based rhythmic unit, as a phono-syntactic component, has potential to show the extent of automaticity beyond individual words and reveal the textual organization ability of readers, which in turn has educational, didactic, and clinical implications for the acquisition of written language.
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