Have you ever heard someone read a poem terribly - stopping at the wrong places, saying the lines dryly and not adding any emotional overtones? The reason for this is the lack of prosody. This is a collection of elements used in reading aloud, such as raising or lowering the voice, expressiveness, and pausing when necessary.
Prosodic elements
There are three main elements to consider: expression, intonation, and pauses when reading. Let's talk about each of them in turn:
- Voice expression portrays a character or emotion in a certain way to help your audience get the point across and stay on the same wavelength.
- Another important element of prosodic is intonation, or the rising and falling of the voice when speaking. This is extremely important not only for accurately reflecting what is happening, but also for capturing the attention of the audience.
- The last basic element is punctuation. Using an exclamation mark can change the whole intonationsentences, and a pause in a certain place can change the meaning altogether. The most common in this case are periods and commas. Whenever you encounter the end of a thought, you must make a hard stop or pause. Usually it's something like restoring breathing before starting again. The comma needs a soft or short pause because it's not the end. The pause simply separates the thought into its component parts.
Moving on.
What is prosodic?
Prosody is a concept in psychology that combines a mixture of fluency and expressiveness of speech. If you follow all its rules, then it will be alive, natural and full of emotions. Often in the initial stages of learning to read, children are faced with such problems as robotic absorption and reproduction of letters in a monophonic rhythm and without emotional coloring. Next, we will find out what prosody is in speech therapy and how you can develop your speech in practice, what strategies to use.
Speak with expression
The first step to good reading is to learn how to speak expressively. This may seem obvious, but in reality all people speak at different levels of expressive coloring. You can instill prosodic (stress, tempo, intonation, pauses) in the speech therapist's office, as well as at home. In class, it is important to focus on speaking with as much expression as possible. It is also worth working out the over-emphasizing of some of your emotions andintonations. Although it seems funny, the exercise really works. As a person speaks, so he will read.
Speak in character voice
Even without a theatrical performance, one can get to the heart of the plot with the help of such strategies as speaking or reading in the voice of a fairy tale or any other character. When parts of the dialogue are spoken in different voices, this greatly simplifies understanding, as readers can get into the feelings and experiences of the character. Here prosodic is an illustration of the connection between written and spoken language.
Word stress
All languages have rhythms, natural forms of accent, which are necessary in order to speak and understand that language. Stress is a linguistic term for natural accent patterns in spoken language. When you read a sentence, which syllables do you underline in each word? Every language has its own style of stress. Once you've learned the basic template, you can figure out how to pronounce any word in a certain language correctly. We know that a syllable is stressed if louder, longer or higher than others.
Although every language is different, there are two basic text stress rules that are consistently found in most human languages. First, there can be only one main stressed syllable in a word. Some long words will have secondary stress, but it is still secondary. Secondly, the stress falls on vowels, andnot into consonants, since in oral speech syllables are determined by vowels.
The Art of Prosody
Prosody is not just a combination of stress, intonation and punctuation, it is an intonation-expressive coloring of speech. Intonation is the rise or fall of the voice. Often the strength, tone and height of the latter make it clear what the speaker wanted to convey to us. Feelings play an important role here. With the help of a high voice, you can convey enthusiasm, enthusiasm, joy or distrust and suspicion. A little in a different tone, but also with its help, anger and fear are transmitted. Sadness, grief and fatigue are expressed in soft and muted tones with a decrease in intonation towards the end of the sentence.
The speed of speech is also an element of prosodic. Fluent speech can be a feature of the speaker or a sign of agitation and anxiety, as well as the desire to convince of something. If an individual speaks slowly, this may indicate depression, arrogance, or fatigue. Interjections, sighs and even nervous coughs, snorts and other extraneous sounds are an integral part of prosody. This list could be endless. Often sounds and gestures mean much more than the words themselves.