The development of stress sensitivity and its contribution to word reading in school-aged children.

Abstract

This study examined the development of stress sensitivity and its relationship with word reading. Previous research has rarely measured phoneme and stress sensitivity in the same task, making a direct comparison of the contribution between the two in reading development difficult. Participants were native English-speaking adults and children at ages of 6, 8, and 10 years (N = 24, 22, 22, and 24, respectively). A lexical decision task was used to measure both stress and phoneme sensitivity. Oral vocabulary, phoneme awareness, and word reading were assessed. Stress sensitivity accounted for unique variance in reading over and above vocabulary and phoneme awareness in 6-year-olds. Both adults and children had better phoneme sensitivity than stress sensitivity. These findings highlight the unique contribution of stress sensitivity in reading development. The current study made a novel contribution to studying the relationship between prosody and literacy by utilising a task that is able to assess children's stress and phoneme sensitivity simultaneously.