Detecting stress patterns is related to children’s performance on reading tasks

This paper investigates the relationship between the ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 6–8 years who completed tasks involving reading words, reading pseudowords, stressing pseudowords, and reproducing pseudoword stress patterns. Results showed that the capacity to reproduce pseudoword stress patterns accounted for a unique portion of the variance in text reading, after controlling for phonological awareness, phoneme sensitivity, and working memory. In addition, stress sensitivity predicted children’s performance in stressing pseudowords. These results suggest that stress sensitivity may affect fluency in reading as well as word stress learning.