Metrical stress sensitivity in young children and its relationship to phonological awareness and reading

Abstract

This paper reports two studies of young English‐speaking children's ability to cope with changes to the metrical stress pattern of spoken words and the relationship between this ability, phonological awareness and early reading development. Initially, 39 children aged 4 and 5 years were assessed on their ability to identify mispronounced words, including words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed. The children were significantly worse at identifying words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed than words that were mispronounced in other ways. The second study was a cross‐sectional comparison of 31 5, 6 and 7‐year‐old children's performance on the metrical stress reversal condition of the mispronunciation task. Measures of the children's written language skills and phonological awareness were also taken. The 7‐year‐old children outperformed the 5‐year‐olds on the metrical stress task. Performance on this measure was associated with most of the measures of phonological awareness and literacy, and was associated with rhyme awareness and spelling ability after age had been taken into account. Moreover, metrical stress sensitivity could account for variance in spelling ability after phonological awareness had been taken into account, and after vocabulary had been taken into account. This suggests that stress sensitivity may influence spelling development in a way that is independent of its contribution to phonological representations.