“And this one’s juuust right!”: Prosody Predicts Reading Comprehension in Hong Kong Chinese-English Bilingual Children

This study examined the development of prosodic reading and its within- and cross-language contributions to reading comprehension among 121 Cantonese-English bilingual second-graders (aged 7 years, 70 girls) in 2015, and 52 of them as third-graders in 2016. Spectrographic analysis of their reading of one Chinese and one English passage revealed both cross-language similarities and language-specific differences in the use of pitch and pause when producing syntactically complex sentences. Wh question pitch contours emerged as the most robust predictor of reading comprehension across Chinese (r = .359) and English (r = -.457). A crossover effect occurred from Cantonese pitch to English reading comprehension (r = -.169). These results support the prosodic catalysing hypothesis, indicating the role of pitch in reading comprehension.