Have you ever heard someone terribly reading a poem - stopping in the wrong places, pronouncing lines dryly and not adding any emotional coloring? The lack of prosody is to blame. This is a collection of elements used when reading aloud, such as raising or lowering the voice, expressiveness and pause, when necessary.
Prosodiki elements
Three basic elements must be taken into account: expression, intonation, and pauses in reading. Let's talk about each of them in turn:
- Voice expression depicts a character or emotions in a specific way to help your audience understand the point and stay on the same wavelength.
- Another important element of prosody is intonation, or raising and lowering the voice during a conversation. This is extremely important not only to accurately reflect what is happening, but also to attract the attention of the audience.
- The last major element is punctuation. Using an exclamation mark can change the whole intonation of a sentence, and a pause in a certain place can change the meaning altogether. The most common in this case are periods and commas. Whenever you are faced with the end of a thought, you must make a hard stop or pause. This is usually a bit of a breath restoration before starting again. A comma requires a soft or short pause, because this is not the end. A pause simply divides the thought into its component parts.
We move on.
What is prosodica?
Prosodica is a concept in psychology that combines a mixture of fluency and expressiveness of speech. If you follow all her rules, then she will be lively, natural and full of emotions. Often, at the initial stages of reading instruction, children encounter problems such as robotic absorption and reproduction of letters in a uniform rhythm and without emotional coloring. Next, we learn what prosodica is in speech therapy and how in practice you can develop your speech, which strategies to use.
We speak with the expression
The first step to literate reading is to learn to speak expressively. This may seem obvious, but in reality, all people speak at different levels of expressive coloring. You can instill prosodic (stress, pace, intonation, pauses) in the office of a speech therapist, as well as at home. In the classroom, it is important to concentrate on the conversation with the highest possible expression. And also it is worth working out the excessive emphasis on some of your emotions and intonations. Although it seems funny, the exercise really works. As a person says, so he will read.
Speak character voice
Even without a theatrical performance, you can understand the essence of the plot using a strategy such as speaking or reading the voice of a fairy-tale or any other character. When parts of the dialogue are pronounced in different voices, this greatly simplifies understanding, since readers can be imbued with the feelings and emotions of the character. Here prosodika is an illustration of the connection between written and spoken language.
Accent
All languages have rhythms, natural forms of emphasis, which are necessary in order to speak and understand this language. Stress is a linguistic term for natural colloquial emphasis patterns. When you read the sentence, what syllables do you underline in each word? Any language has its own accent style. After you have studied the basic pattern, you can understand how to correctly pronounce any word in a particular language. We know that a syllable is emphasized if it is louder, longer or higher than others.
Although all languages are different, there are two basic rules for textual stress that are consistently found in most human languages. Firstly, a word can have only one main stressed syllable. Some long words will have a secondary stress, but it is still secondary. Secondly, the emphasis falls on vowels, not consonants, since in oral speech syllables are defined by vowels.
Art prosodiki
Prosodica is not just a combination of stress, intonation and punctuation, it is an intonational-expressive coloring of speech. Intonation is the rise or fall of a voice. Often the strength, tone and height of the latter make it clear what the speaker wanted to bring to us. Feelings play an important role here. With a high voice, you can convey enthusiasm, joy, or distrust and suspicion. A little in a different tone, but also with his help anger and fear are transmitted. Sadness, grief and fatigue are expressed in soft and muffled tones with a decrease in intonation towards the end of the sentence.
Speech speed is also an element of prosody. Fluency can be a feature of the speaking person or a sign of emotion and anxiety, as well as a desire to convince of something. If an individual speaks slowly, it may mean a depressed state, arrogance, or fatigue. An integral part of prosodyki are interjections, sighs and even a nervous cough, snorting and other extraneous sounds. This list can be endless. Often sounds and gestures mean much more than the words themselves.