The Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features of Reading and Telling Stories

Abstract

Four teachers read and told preschool children well-known stories which were recorded. Two composite tapes were prepared from the recordings. Ten-second sections of tape were spliced together to form 112 randomly intermixed examples of each teacher reading and telling stories to two groups of children. Fifty-six items were treated by a low-pass filter which removed all content information but preserved prosodic and paralinguistic information. Two groups of 11 adult subjects each judged whether the segment was an example of reading or telling. For both filtered and unfiltered speech, the subjects could accurately discriminate reading from telling; they were more accurate on the unfiltered portions of the tape. A qualitative analysis of items easy and difficult to judge correctly, indicated a number of variables that were probably instrumental in making the reading-telling distinction. These variables were coded from the original unfiltered tapes. Reading appears to be more rapid and free of hesitations, which can be explained by story telling being a cognitively creative task. An important stylistic variant is the placement of the speaker-tag before or after a quotation. The tag after the quote is a literary form almost never used in telling stories; the tag before the quote is used both in reading and telling.