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Ladle Rat Rotten Hut is a phonetic re-telling of the classic fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood.This site is enhanced by sound capabilities available through the plug-in "RealAudio helper" which can be downloaded from the site. Even if you do not have sound capabilities on your computer or do not want to download the plug-in, you will still be able to do the exercises. Read this story out loud. If you have sound capabilities and are able to download the plug-in, you can also listen to the story.In spite of the fact that the words on the page are very different from the meanings intended by the words, can you understand the text by listening? What does this show us about the importance of intonation in language comprehension?
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I did not have the capabilities on my computer but I read it out loud to myself and it did not really take long for me to figure out what it was. I looked at the site before reading anything and then again after reading what was expected of us. It was very interesting how it was set up. I found myself alsmost sounding out the words that written wrong to compensate for the words that were supposed to be there and what I was expecting to hear.

The story is very hard to understand and I had to listen to it a number of times even though I already know the story of Red Riding Hood. Even though all of the words in the story are words used in the english language, I found myself trying to substitute them for the words that I thought should be there so I could make sense of it. This "problem" relies on a person's background knowledge of the story in order to understand the words. Someone who has never heard the origonal story would not be able to make sense of "Ladle Rat Rotton Hut". The intonation helped me to identify what was going on in the story a little bit but I found the woman speaking in a somewhat monotone voice.

Mike are you out there?

Hi! I listened to it once without following along in the text. It took a little bit of concentration, but I could understand most of it. However, when I listened and tried to read the text at the same time, I couldn't make any sense of it. It seemed that when I was reading, the words took on their proper definition, and the sentences didn't make sense. I just couldn't understand it; barely enough to follow along. The text was more of a distraction to me.

The intonation was crucial to my understanding of the story. I even tried to read it aloud and could not make sense of it. If I couldn't hear the story, I wouldn't be able to comprehend any of it. While listening, it seemed like I could pick out the 'correct' words, and I could not hear the actual words being spoken. The more I listened, the easier it became to understand. I guess that I became accustomed to what some of the 'funny' phrases translated to. It was like I became used to someone's foreign accent. The intonation is important to language comprehension because without it, I could not understand the story.

I think this is a pretty interesting site that says a few things about language comprehension. From reading the words we realize how engrained the pronunciation of certain letter strings becomes in skilled readers. We have to concentrate hard to overcome this as Mike said. It would be interesting to see how unskilled readers or problem readers might comprehend Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. Good Comments.

The fact that we all listened to or read the story a number of times shows that we were all involved in perceptual organization. There were a number of different approaches taken to understand this story. We listened to it without reading, read it without listening, and finally, read and listened to it at the same time. This approach allowed us to look at the "problem" from a number of different angles in order to comprehend it. We needed to take the words that were given to us and manipulate them so that they made sense. We had to use our background knowledge of the origonal story in order to make these manipulations and comparisons.

For the two of us who had the opportunity to listen to the story, we found that listening without reading was easier for comprehension. Could it be that visual stimuli tends to be a stronger and more precise way to take in information that audio stimuli is? Or could it be that we are just used to changing things we hear that don't make sense into something that does make sense to us as in Mike's foreign accent example above? It seemed that we used the words that were presented to symbolize words that would make sense in that context. It is possible that someone who is an unskilled reader might have an easier time understanding the story by reading alone because young children who are just learning to read often look at the context of a word and the sound of it's letters as a tool for guessing what the actual word might be. Since we are all skilled and critical readers, we tend to look at every word and letter in detail and analyze it more carefully.

Along with reading and listening to the words, we used an additional aspect to absorb the story's meaning. The intonation or the rise and fall of the reader's pitch while telling the story helps to connect with the emotional details. For example, the woman's voice became gruff when she was portraying the wolf which helped us as listeners to identify that the wolf was talking and that he is an aggressive character. The note of caution in her voice when the mother spoke helped us to sense that there was an element of danger in the story.