Frank Boutsen, a professor in the Department of Communication Disorders in the College of Health, Education and Social Transformation, joined NMSU in 2020. Boutsen’s research interests include prosody, or reading with expression, speech science and motor speech disorders.
Boutsen was recently published in the leading journal in his research field, the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research. His article, titled “Reading Warm-Up, Reading Skill, and Reading Prosody When Reading the ‘My Grandfather’ Passage: An Exploratory Study Born Out of the Motor Planning Theory of Prosody and Reading Prosody Research,” was the lead and only clinical-focus article in that volume. His study explored two warm-up conditions, silent reading and oral, plus silent reading.
According to the research, these warm-up conditions have potential to increase reading prosody in normal readers and persons being assessed for motor-speech disorders. The study found silent reading preceded by reading out loud influenced reading prosody by a significant amount. These findings can now be used by clinicians to enhance children’s reading prosody.
Before coming to NMSU, Boutsen was a professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.