Intonation Patterns

I was very glad to notice that Mabie knew how to use the proper suprasegmental features while reading a story. She knew the right intonation pattern for a declarative and interrogative sentences and she knew how to exaggerate a sentence in the exclamatory form. For instance, while reading the repeated questions of the main character in the story "The Amazing Hat", Mabie used a rising intonation for the question "Is may hat pretty?" . And she quickly shifted to the proper intonation pattern for declaratives as she read the responses of the other characters. She also read the statement "Charge!, Filemon shouted!" from the story FilemonMamon, with emphasis with the exclamatory sentence, as she made her voice louder and uttered it with a longer period of time, compared to the rest of the sentence. However, there were some inconsistencies with the way Mabie exhibited the use of suprasegmentals. Whenever she couldn't understand the meaning of a sentence, she tend to read in a more or less flat tone when the sentence actually requires either a rising or falling intonation. Because of this, it can be concluded that suprasegmental features can be a factor in checking the reading comprehension of children. Whenever they get the meaning of a statement, they are likely to read it with the expected intonation pattern. Thus when asking a child to read a story, we can check if they are comprehending what they reading not only through a reading comprehension test after they have finished reading but also through listening to the way they read the lines of the characters in the story.