Poetry and Syllable-Stress Identification as the Means for Understanding Dyslexia and Reading-Related Difficulties

Abstract

In young adults and adolescents, dyslexia typically is characterized by slow or laborious reading. These reading difficulties are underpinned at least partly by a phonological deficit that disrupts cognitive connections between spoken and written language. Prosodic stress is a phonological property of spoken language reflecting differences in syllable stress, for example, between the noun REC.ord and the verb re.CORD. Prosodic stress is not reflected in the written form “record,” but evidence suggests that knowledge of prosodic stress is relatively weak in people with dyslexia. The present study examines the abilities of young adults with and without a history of dyslexia to identify stressed syllables in poems. In our main analysis, there was no significant difference for marking stressed syllables between the participants with and without dyslexia. However, accuracy for marking stress correlated with a measure of nonword reading, consistent with previous findings of overlapping segmental and prosodic deficits in dyslexia. Additional correlations of the task to both reading and language measures raise questions about the overlap between dyslexia and other disorders, particularly developmental language disorder. We also discuss how the poetry task could be used as an instructional intervention or treatment activity for people with limited awareness of prosodic stress.