Rhythm Reader Pro●

About Rhythm Reader Pro

Rhythm Reader Pro is an interactive model of implicit prosody in silent reading. It is designed for close analysis, teaching, and research rather than as a rule for how a passage must be spoken.

Reading the notation

Every syllable carries values on distinct layers. Word stress (lexical) is the fixed pattern a word has in the dictionary, written with digits: 1 primary stress, 2 secondary stress, 0 unstressed — so banana is 010. Template records the word's preliminary strong–weak preference from lexical stress: happy is SW, above WS, understand WWS, and wonderful SWW. A sequence such as banana (WSW) is not treated as a fifth foot. At phrase level, its syllables are grouped across a boundary—for example, a weak pickup followed by SW—or combined with neighboring words. Beats (rhythmic) show how each syllable is realized in this sentence: S strong, W weak. A word such as of has citation stress in the dictionary but usually receives no rhythmic beat in context.

Phrase prominence is shown separately with ▲. A phrase nucleus may be prominent without occupying a regular metrical beat, so the triangle and beat styling can appear independently.

Feet group syllables across words using only five English patterns: trochee SW, iamb WS, anapest WWS, dactyl SWW, and amphibrach WSW. The amphibrach is a phrase rhythm only: a single word such as banana is never given an amphibrach template of its own. A phrase may begin with a one-syllable pickup or end with one unmatched syllable when the available text does not form a complete foot. Feet never cross punctuation-bounded intonational phrases; they may cross automatically estimated inner phrase boundaries. Some regular text supports more than one plausible scansion; the app reports that ambiguity rather than concealing it.

Editing

Click any syllable to toggle the selected tier (a beat on the Beats tier; cycle 0 → 1 → 2 on the Word-stress tier). Double-click a word, press I or Shift+Enter on a focused syllable, or use Inspect in the analysis table, to open the word inspector, where you can choose template variants, split or merge syllables, and reset the word to its dictionary analysis. Edited syllables are marked with a dotted underline; every edit is recorded and exported.

The divergence measure

The analysis table reports a Prosodic Divergence Index (PDI): how far the current annotation, after your edits, sits from the fully automatic default, averaged over four components — word stress, template, beats, and phrasing (each 0–1). The component breakdown matters more than the composite: it says which representation you disagreed with. PDI is an edit-distance measure from this model's default; it is not an independent measure of a reader's prosodic ability. In the Phrases display mode, boundaries themselves are editable: click ❘ to remove one, + to insert one.

Research mode

With research mode on (and an optional participant ID), the app records every edit as a process measure: what changed, on which tier, latency since the previous action, the model-fit score of the value being overridden, and whether the edit reverses an earlier one. A recording indicator is always shown while logging — the instrument never records covertly. Export the log via Research session log; it also rides along inside the JSON export. Note the resolution caveat: these are click-level latencies in a browser, informative about deliberation and ordering, not a substitute for eye-tracking-grade timing.

Sources and model fit

Each analysis is tagged with its source: the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, a named fallback rule (for words not in the dictionary), or your own edit. Model-fit scores are heuristic indications, not calibrated probabilities.

Running locally

This file is self-contained and runs offline. For full dictionary coverage, place cmudict.js in the site root, one folder above this page (the page requests ../cmudict.js); without it, an embedded subset of common words is used and other words fall back to transparent rules.