Does prosody enable children to improve their emotional inference skills when it comes to understanding oral narratives?
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Comprehension is a crucial skill, but there are disparities between students. This study examines the role of prosody in the development of the ability to infer emotions when listening to a story among Grade 3 students. Previous research suggests that prosodic elements such as intonation, rhythm and stress contribute to narrative comprehension (Blanc & Quenette, 2017). Our study examines whether marked prosody improves students' ability to infer emotions from heard texts. In this experiment, we divided the students (N=25) into two groups, each of which was exposed to four stories in two conditions: neutral prosody and marked prosody. The students had to answer an online comprehension questionnaire as the story progressed, focusing on emotional inferences. The results indicate a significant improvement in inference scores in the marked prosody condition, particularly for emotions with positive valence. These results corroborate studies indicating that prosody facilitates the understanding and recognition of emotions (e.g., Veenendaal et al., 2014) and highlight the pedagogical value of prosodic variation in oral reading.
Source: HAL AMU
Authors: Vazeux, Maria, Sanchez, Lisa, Mookta, Mehdi
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7205608870